Did You Know That Lemonade Has Lemon in It

It was a lovely warm day and I was sitting drinking a glass of generic brand diet lemonade. My mind started to wander, as it does, and my eyes happened to rest upon the bottle sitting on the table. I notice the label that said "Diet Lemonade” with a subtext, “Made with Lemon Juice.”

I wondered why such a statement should need to have been made. What would you expect to have been a drink that was called lemonade? Chocolate bananas? Aardvark mucus? ‘Come on guys,’ I said to myself, ‘why would you feel it necessary to qualify fact that lemonade has lemon in it?

The label, therefore, warranted closer inspection.

This 'Lemonade' contained:

Carbonated water

Lemon juice from concentrate (1%)

Citric Acid

Flavouring

Acidity Regulator (Sodium Citrates)

Preservatives (Sodium Benzoate, Potassium Sorbate)

Sweeteners (Aspartame Sodium Saccharine)

This had a final sub note of “Contains a source of Phenylalanine.”

Gee, what ARE all these chemicals? Man, this made it feel like a really healthy drink. So the manufacturer found it necessary to mention that there was Lemon juice in it, even though it constituted only 1%.

 Of course, the label had the traffic light system.

It was less than 1% calories (green), trace fat(green), trace saturates(green), less than 1 gram salt (green), and less than 1% trace sugars (green).

So the green ‘traffic lights’ across-the-board on the label made it look healthy.

But it also should have included another element in the traffic light system.

The one red light at the bottom of the list meaning “no nutritional value or any fucking flavour whatsoever.”

Funny True Story 3 - Canal Boat Holiday.

There was a guy I used to work with called Des. I don’t know whether it was short for Desmond or desperate. But that is only slightly relevant to the story. Des lived with his wife and his mother-in-law. Besides all the obvious and usual jokes, this was not an ideal situation for Des. He did not get on with his mother-in-law all that well and each day he used to come into work with various stories and horrors of his life at home.

Most of the time we took these with a pinch of salt but there is one happenstance I know to be true and maybe is indicative of life that Des had to live.

One day Des came into work and he actually looked happy for once. The reason for this sudden onset of enjoyment was that he had managed to book a holiday. OK, as well as for him and his wife, it also included his mother-in-law, being the only way to persuade his wife to allow him to book it. It was a bit of a victory for him as it was difficult and almost impossible to get his mother-in-law to go anywhere, let alone on a holiday.

He had booked a canal boat holiday on a traditional narrowboat. A real traditional narrowboat, as it was not diesel powered but horse-drawn in the same manner as when the canals were first built. A week of quiet meandering through the countryside just watching the world go silently by.

As the months turned to weeks Des’s anticipation remained constantly buoyant. His whole being, it seemed, was focused on this one single marvellous event in his life.

Then one day, a couple of weeks before the holiday was due to commence, he came into work with such a manner of sadness and anger it was a shock, even to us. Apparently, unbeknownst to him his mother-in-law had cancelled the holiday. The reason she gave was cruelty to animals. Apparently, she had failed to grasp what a going on a horse-drawn narrowboat entailed.

She thought it was cruel to make a horse swim and tow boats as well.

You couldn’t make this up.