Upon finishing his studies, Lane opened a fashionable spa for hydropathy at Moor Park in Surrey, where his patients — including Charles Darwin — underwent a fanciful range of water cures to calm their irritable nerves.
Elsewhere, fanciful versions of New York rooftop water towers – on roundabouts and in vacant lots – mark the path of the Pent stream, which flows beneath the streets, and offer a disconcerting trail through the town.
Nick Clegg has said it is fanciful to think that cumbersome water cannon will help stop sporadic public disorder like the London riots, but added that a decision to deploy them is an operational one for the police and the home secretary.
Our focuses are honed while at the same time we can zone out in the fanciful slow motion of our under water world.
Other products however, have adopted an even more direct approach – if eau-de-peche sounds a little fanciful, then how about smelling like toilet water, literally?
If this sounds fanciful, go inside, listen to the thundering water, where two divers drowned in 1971 and several speleologist teams attempted to explore and gave up, and it won't.
And maybe an older student, who hasn't graduated in ten years, telling fanciful tales about the "party pills" and water pistols full of tequila of yore, and being told he's making it all up.
The idea of using sunlight to convert water into a fuel may sound fanciful.
The idea that in riots, when people are scurrying down small streets smashing windows and then rushing off in small groups, that a great big lumbering water cannon can be wheeled out is fanciful".
John Leland, writing in the 1500s, gives a more fanciful account, in which the queen falling into the water prompted the action.
