Learner Dad: There's a poltergeist in our house who steals water bottles 

Most of the time, these bottles just disappear. They’re like a sub-plot in Stranger Things. Picture: Pexels

We need to talk about refillable water bottles.

I’m beginning to wonder if they’re eco-friendly at all.

I can see why they appear to be friendly. The bottled water aisle in the local supermarket is how we bring this planet to an end. It’s a sea of plastic between the bottles and the tight wrapping that keeps them together.

Far better to buy a reusable bottle and fill that up, right?

Maybe not, if you have kids. I realised this the other day when I bought a shiny new bottle in our local supermarket, for my son. This is the third bottle I’ve bought in a month. That’s not exactly reusable.

Sometimes they are left behind. This usually happens on a day out at a pet farm, or on a trip to a swimming pool. Don’t ask me if it’s more ecologically sound to drive back and retrieve the bottle or to buy a new one, but we always buy a new one.

Most of the time, these bottles just disappear. They’re like a sub-plot in Stranger Things, the sci-fi drama on Netflix where nothing is as it seems.

I blame the kids for losing their bottles because that’s what parents do. They insist they handed me the bottle out of their gear bag and I half-remember that they did because I’m getting old now and I only half-remember everything.

This all comes to a head when we need a water bottle in a hurry to get them out the door. I go to the water bottle cupboard, and it’s bare, except for a baby water bottle we’ve had for five years that just refuses to get lost. If any water-bottle designer boffin is reading this, I’m happy to forward a photo of this unloseable bottle so that all future versions can follow this design, and hopefully save the planet.

Unfortunately, this bottle could become useless at any moment. I’m surprised my son in particular hasn’t pointed out that it’s for a baby and he’s not having any of it. At which point we’re back to buying two loseable bottles a month.

It’s not just that they’re good at getting lost. I reckon they’re not very good at being water bottles.

They’re getting increasingly hard to open. The green one I bought last weekend has a weird-screw top that stays looped onto the bottle itself. You might well have bought one yourself recently, they’re on-trend in the water-bottle scene. But they’re hard to open for little hands and the top has a habit of hitting you on the nose when you lean back to take a slug of water.

So while the boffins have managed to solve the ‘top is missing’ issue (which retired plenty of bottles), they’ve created a ‘hits me in the nose’ issue which means kids will reject them over time.

A lot of newer bottles are just wannabe flasks. What’s going on there? We have about four of these metallic bottles with colourful patterns, or at least we had but two are on the missing list. I don’t recall anyone saying “can we have a water bottle that feels like a flask?” — and yet here they are, everywhere.

I just took a look in our water-bottle press and there are five bottles in total there at the moment. That is because we have a poltergeist in our house who steals water bottles and only puts them back after we buy a replacement. But most of these bottles aren’t any good anyway, They don’t deliver a decent drinking experience. The awkward truth is that the best water bottles are the disposable ones in the supermarket. A nice simple twist-off cap with a narrow top-of-bottle for a tidy flow, as against the one that drips down the side of your mouth from a wide top.

So listen up, boffins. All we want is a water bottle with a narrow top, that can’t be lost. Any chance you could design one for my kids?