Andy Hawthorne

We just wanted a healthy drink on a quiet Sunday afternoon…

My wife Mary, a woman whose internal filing system could give a supercomputer an inferiority complex, and I, a man whose ability to locate an item is directly proportional to its immediate necessity, consider ourselves, in the grand cosmic scheme of things, to be organised.

By ‘Organised,’ I mean we are generally capable of acquiring foodstuffs on a designated day (Thursday, usually) such that when a craving for a specific liquid or solid of dubious nutritional value strikes, the object of that craving is, remarkably, present, even on Sundays.

(An entirely separate, and considerably more irritating, matter is the complete and utter lack of those tokens that one is supposed to exchange for a legitimate reason not to participate in working Mondays. They seem to be issued from the same ethereal, unreachable government department that handles socks that vanish in the dryer. If anyone has the interplanetary coordinates for that particular bureaucratic black hole, do let me know.)

Anyway, this particular Sunday, it was the turn of the Oasis Summer Fruits drink. A beverage which, the label enthusiastically assured us, was a real fruit drink with natural flavours, an assertion one treats with the same healthy skepticism one reserves for a politician promising tax cuts.

But the precise chemical composition of the fluid was, to be brutally honest, irrelevant. Because the bottles themselves, you see, were not merely containers for a sugary, fruity liquid. Oh no. They were, in fact, Sculptures. Or perhaps extremely trendy, low-grade Health Statements. Or possibly, given the sheer impossibility of the next step, elaborate and highly frustrating Ornamental Traps.

The simple, fundamental, biologically necessary action of opening the bottle and drinking the damn stuff was, it turned out, the one thing you were explicitly prevented from doing.

The caps. Ah, the caps. They were not merely sealed. They were welded. Not in the casual, ‘let’s keep the flavour in’ sense. No, they were sealed with the kind of implacable, physics-defying finality usually reserved for the Master Vault of the Bank of England or the personal jam stash of an extremely possessive and slightly mad intergalactic despot. You were not getting in. Not even if you genuinely believed a quick swig of fruity sugar water would solve all your existential dilemmas.

My initial, gentle, human-level attempts were, predictably, a pathetic failure. I escalated. Vice grips were summoned. A plumbing wrench—a device designed to intimidate uncooperative pipes into submission—was introduced. And then came the vocabulary. A truly breathtaking, multi-syllabic torrent of words beginning with ‘f,’ many of which, in a moment of stressed phonetic slippage, may have sounded uncannily like ‘duck’ or ‘tucker.’

Yet, the infernal screw caps refused to surrender their grip. I may have managed to successfully unscrew them, but the caps themselves remained stubbornly, adhesively, Attached to the bottle neck, like a limpet whose life’s purpose was to frustrate my Sunday afternoon.

We gave up. We reached that stage of exhausted resignation where one accepts the absurdity of existence. Mary, in a moment of pure, low-tech genius, discovered the ‘fold it back’ technique, which involved bending the cap just enough to create a small, manageable fissure through which one could, at great risk of dripping, ingest the beverage.

And that’s when the truth, cold and utterly predictable, dawned on me.

Somewhere, in a vast, echoing, brightly lit bottling factory, there are people. They are not merely employees. They are Agents of Utter Cap Frustration.

“Hey! Stan!” I can hear the man—let’s call him Kevin—yell across the vast conveyor belt. “Did you see that one? I let it run on the machine for an extra ten seconds! The torque setting is currently listed as ‘Vengeful Deity’!”

“Any chance of it opening, Kev?”

“Nope,” cackles Kevin, wiping a tear of cynical mirth from his eye. “No chance whatsoever. The machine has screwed it down tighter than the airlock door on the International Space Station after a particularly cranky astronaut has just remembered he left his thermos on Earth!”

(Much, deeply unsettling laughter ensues, the kind of laughter that can only be produced by those who actively enjoy low-grade human misery.)

So, we drank our bottles of sugary fruit drink, our shoulders slumped in the face of such magnificent manufacturing malice. The only logical recourse, of course, was to install the vice grips and the pipe wrench permanently in the cutlery drawer. They are now officially part of our essential Sunday tableware, ready for the next utterly trivial, yet cosmically infuriating, challenge set by the bottling factories of the world.