The bottle of water

There was a Robinson's juice bottle which had been emptied of juice and refilled with tap water at work but left untouched for days. I'd seen it sat on a table at work and it never reduced in liquid. That set my mind in motion. How long would it sit there without being thrown out? A week? A month? A year? Slowly gathering dust, this water would become something form just a redundant present day item to a historical casket of liquid matter which held within it a time which had passed. It was the end of March and so come April, which it is now, it would become every so slightly rarer. The water now sits as a product of earths atmosphere from March 2014. Sure, there are probably shelves of drinks in shops and houses which can lay claim to that and some maybe, even older. But the hope of my not returning to it to find it emptied grew. 

I had permission from its owner to keep it from being discarded. 

The water did not full the bottle in its entirety and held air at the top. As some old record played on the radio I allowed my mind to fast forward to this bottles future in my possession. I imagined myself producing this bottle to show my son in ten years when he was about to turn 16 and saying "you were 5 when this water and air was circling the globe. Many people have died since this was securely bottled". It was something trivial and profound to me at the same time. I am in the final months of being able to say I'm in my thirties and this bottle of water holds the air I breathed whilst 39. I could still hold this bottle in one piece  if I reached 100. What about my own son or his son still having it when they reached 100. Imagine having a bottle of water from 100 years ago. 200? 300? Worthless and priceless all at the same time.

I imagined this becoming a family heirloom of fascinating stupidity. "This bottle of water has been handed down generation after generation and is from 500 years ago this year" someone would say. "My great great great great great grandfather was so ridiculous that he kept this bottle of water and his catalogue collection from now redundant companies and made it possible that we could hold them in our hands today". This is why I show this uninteresting item today. Someday it will be the thing of miracles. 

C whitehouse. 2014. (The man who had too much thinking time)