Water on the Brain

Some people have a difficult relationship with machines, their hostility seeming to choose victims at random. Although I’ve had the occasional rebuff from liquidizers – which make you pay dearly for inattention with the lid – and electric sockets (I must stop cleaning them with a wet cloth), it’s water that really seems to have it in for me. It’s not that water is an element with any inherent malignance, as like its chums it can also be benign, but there’s an unpredictable, mischief-making quality about it, an ability stealthily to insinuate and destabilize, that has earned it a regular place at the back of my mind. I had various skirmishes with it in North Wales.