It’s no secret that the royals struggle with relatability. But every so often, they stumble upon a PR masterstroke, almost always by accident – think Queen Camilla’s not-so-secret fag habit, for example. Last week, a carton of Vita Coco coconut water (£2.60 from Tesco or, more likely, £3 from Waitrose) was spotted in the door of the Princess of Wales’s Audi as she dismounted to attend the wedding of Harriet Sperling to Peter Phillips. Not a warm, squashed bottle of garage water that may have been sitting in the footwell of the car with a dog, but coconut water. Water, maxxed; life, hacked.
Naturally, theories proliferate as to why the future queen would be glugging from what is widely known to be a hangover cure. Sorry, an ‘electrolyte-infused feel-good sports drink’. Vita Coco (approximately 95 per cent water and, presumably, 5 per cent coconut) markets itself as ‘a hydrating drink that can help you hit your daily hydration standards’.
But its website, a carousel of feel-good philanthropy adorned with pictures of labourers in coconut fields, seems to suggest far more. Vita Coco presents me with a series of playschool pictures in its signature bright blue and faintly comic font, and I’m in the mood to believe them all. It is ‘feel good fuel’ but also ‘backed by athletes as nature’s sports drink’; it will ‘take me to the tropics’, make my ‘taste buds happy’ and help ‘before and after a night out’.
All of which makes me long for a simple glass of water. Once upon a time, long before the words ‘hydrating’ or ‘electrolytes’ had entered common parlance, water was used to slake thirst. People drank from taps and crouched over fountains in village squares; they cupped their hands and slurped from John Donne’s ‘crystal brooks’ and feared the glass of water that may have emanated from Dickens’s ‘deadly sewer’ of the Thames. Sometimes a glass of water is just a glass of water, as a certain Viennese doctor might have said.
Yet the latest trend of ‘watermaxxing’ on TikTok illustrates how moral panic has come for our water. In a video viewed 489,000 times, a young man stands in his kitchen urging us to ‘stay hydrated, like seriously’ by ‘going hard on water’ before ending by ‘urging us to reach our water goals’. I consider this briefly: were I to reach my water goals by slurping the recommended one gallon of water per day, I estimate that I would not meet my ‘life goals’ of combining career and motherhood since I would spend all my time on the loo, thereby missing deadlines and the school pick-up. I suppose Vita Coco could help me watermaxx and reach my hydration aims by streamlining these burdensome obligations into one nifty carton, but I worry I might buzz myself out on electrolytes and do something mad like join a gym or do sport.
All this is nothing new, as it rarely is. The notion that we can enrich ourselves with something purer than food has long been part of our collective fantasy. The ancient Greeks wrote about Ambrosia, a food which conferred immortality on whoever ate it.
Coconut water, with its lofty political claims, celebrity endorsements and health benefits, is no different although perhaps less lyrical. And so I say this to the Princess of Wales: watermaxx as you will but make sure you are never far from a lav.
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