But this is madness! It’s an empty bottle!
Once upon a time we started buying water in bottles. Eau no, cried the 'what's wrong with water out of a tap' brigade. Now, if you're so inclined, you can spend £60 on bottled air.
Coast Capture Air, based at Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, travels “the length and breadth of Great Britain seeking unspoiled places of natural beauty to monitor and capture the freshest coastal air”. They claim that consumers all over the world fed up with breathing in car fumes are snapping it up as an aid to healthy living.
The company bottles air from Suffolk, the Isle of Wight and Hartland Point on the Cornish coast It's yours for £60 for the 500ml bottle or £75 if you want the 700ml version. There’s a significant saving, of course, if you do buy the larger size.
Hold on, Hartland Point in Devon! There's been some pushback on that point down in the south-west since Devon and Cornwall view themselves as very distinct entities. Coast Capture Air prefers to market its Hartland Point product as being from the “Cornish heritage coast”, and Devonians are not very happy about it. Which, of course, is perfectly reasonable.
Coast Capture Air should not be confused with Swiss Air Deluxe, which sells tins of Alpine air, or Vitality Air, which supplies air from the Canadian Rockies. They all claim that “People used to mock the idea of bottled water.”
Some of us still do.