Eau what a terrible title

A link to WaterAid, which has a handy calculator to tell you how much water you should be drinking for your body weight. I made a conservative estimate of six glasses a day. Oh no, it told me, you should be drinking 13- YES, 13, YOU APOLOGY FOR A HUMAN BEING - glasses. How am I supposed to do that? Does coffee count? How about the half lemon I've started having in the mornings? Apparently, gulping it down is almost as bad as not drinking it at all. I can't win.

I think my problem with drinking water dates back to primary 1, when Mrs Thorburn made me feel embarrassed for needing to go to the loo more frequently than my contemporaries. The reason was almost certainly tea, which my family drank at breakfast, lunch and on numerous occasions in between. My five-year-old system couldn't deal with a diuretic as well as someone older might. I now have a quite irrational fear of being trapped somewhere with a full bladder - for example in the middle of a row at the cinema - and being unable to escape. It only made matters worse when I was on a school trip to Orkney and endured the bus journey from Thurso to Inverness desperate for the loo and unable to think of much else, while my classmates slept peacefully around me. When it transpires that we need no more than one glass of water a day to be healthy no one will greet the news with more glee than me.