The King of the Juice

I was up 'til late last night, doing a spot of home electronics.
I have disconnected the wires in the plug of Mrs Pither's favourite toy. I will pause briefly now to allow the playground titters and lewd comments to die away............it's not THAT toy. That can only be deactivated by an accredited representative of the National Grid, an Ann Summers engineer and two big lads with a wheelbarrow.
No, although it sounds very much as if it is THAT toy, the new love of Mrs Pither's life is in fact a "juicer". Far from being something akin to a nuclear submarine with a naughty bit underneath, the juicer resembles an old wireless with a funnel-affair on the top.
The primary purpose of this piece of consumerist tat is to produce fruit juice. One stuffs cut-up bits of fruit in the top and the juice is collected in a tub at the bottom. Isn't it amazing what they can do these days? There was me thinking that all you had to do was slice an orange or a lemon in half and then squeeze it in your hand and all the time you actually needed a £25.99 hunk of plugged-in plastic which is destined to end up on the gadget scrapheap in the attic within a month.

I have two objections to this device. Firstly, when it's started up the fucking house shakes! It's about as quiet as Ruby Wax in a mangle! The only thing I can accurately liken it to is a road drill in a bucket of blancmange. The racket goes right through you.

My second objection is what Mrs Pither chooses to make with it. You see, she's gone and bought a book! She's not normally allowed out without her probation officer but she must have slipped her lead at some stage and she now lives by "Super Juice - Juicing for Health and Healing".

I have tried hard to convince my pea-brained partner that the principal attribute of fruit juice is that it contains Vitamin C. Vitamin C is quite handy if you want to
fend off the onset of scurvy but, in the absence of plans to sail to the New World in a galleon with a gang of like-minded Elizabethan sailors, it is not all it is cracked up to be. I have consulted the Pithers' holiday planner and no long, ocean voyages in wooden-hulled, historic vessels with people who have been dead for more than 500 years have been pencilled in so I fail to see why we need the juicer. The
author of Mrs P's new Bible, one Michael Van Straten (wasn't he in Dollar or Bucks Fizz or something) is convinced, however, that it is a panacea.

To read this book, you could be mistaken for thinking that medicine and the conventional practice of healthcare to date are now redundant. There are recipes for "power" juices, "cleansing" juices, "detox" juices, "vitality" juices and even "aphrodisiac" juices! I always know where this book is in the house - you can smell the bullshit a mile off.

The underlying principal behind the recipes is that you have to mush up a load of different fruits in different combinations. Now I seem to recall learning from Miss Potter in art class when I was about seven that there is only one colour you get if you mix yellow with orange with green with red. It is the same colour you get if you swirl together pink and purple and lime and black........it's called BROWN!!

Every single one of these supposed miracle cures resembles the contents of ones toilet bowl after 12 pints and a curry! Strangely enough, and of course I can only guess, I suspect that they also all taste roughly the same.

Anyway, Mrs P and I have had full and frank discussions over the last week about the future of the juicer but we have been unable to reach agreement. Mrs P is all for us abandoning all other forms of nutritional intake and living off the output of this device for ever. I am for taking a hammer to the juicer and carrying out some serious percussive maintenance on it - either that or buying some Vaseline, tracking down Mr Van Straten and seeing just how juiced up he gets when it is inserted into him.
The war of wills finally came to a head late last night when Mrs P decided to once again attack some hapless bits of fruit. I was watching Mrs Brown on the Devil's lantern at the time - if anyone knows how it ends, or at least has a text of the dialogue for the last 20 minutes, I would love to hear from them.
I decided that I couldn't take any more and so after my very-soon-to-be ex-wife had swilled her diarrhoea delight and gone to bed I went into action and unwired the plug. Childish, I know. Petty, I know. Obstinate, I know......but effective.
As I write, Mrs P has been fiddling with the juicer in a desperate attempt to find out what is wrong. I have, of course, been accused of sabotage but I have lied convincingly and merely pointed out that it is the will of God. Mrs P is not electro-whizzkid in manner of Pither and so I think it will take her a while to work out why her juices have dried up (insert menopausal gag here). So, as Mrs P continues to hammer and clunk and rattle in the kitchen, I am left feeling that it will be a happy Christmas after all - even though we should be celebrating the birth of the King of the Juice (fnaar, fnaar).
Juicers can go to Grantham.