From time to time I have been known to contract The Plague.  In reality it’s probably just the common cold, but people generally seem more sympathetic if you call it ‘The Plague’.  Very few people call me on my self-diagnosis, which I guess just means that I must look like the kind of person that could have convincingly spent the last few days in the 14th Century.

This time round The Plague seemed to mainly effect my nasal cavity’s ability to retain its contents. It also seemed to have negative effects on my already quite poor fashion sense – as The Plague increased, so did the likelihood of me wearing slippers to work, and the likelihood of me going to the shops in my pyjama pants, a vest, and a woman’s scarf.  Okay – perhaps I’m being a bit too harsh on The Plague – I wear that scarf even when I’m at full health.

I’m usually a fairly happy and optimistic individual, but when this sort of sickness hits, my irritability levels rise, and it’s generally inanimate objects that are forced to deal with my wrath.  This time round it was a cellphone which had to put up with most of my anger.  My usual phone wasn’t working, and my temporary phone has a painfully pointless tendency to either send messages way too early, or to just simply save the message to drafts before you’ve gotten through the first sentence.

Of course, the cellphone company might try convince you that it was just me pushing buttons incorrectly, but I have been using cellphones long enough to feel confident that I wasn’t just randomly hitting buttons hoping that somehow I’d press them in the right order and with pure luck convey an accurate depiction of what I felt like sharing in text form.  It’s not like I’m sitting there treating my phone in the same way a child might treat an old Street Fighter Arcade, wildly pushing the buttons in a frantic and fairly uncalculated sequence eagerly awaiting the off chance Ryu expels a blue light from his hands, or the big hairy colour changing one electrocutes himself for no apparent reason.

And surely in a world of ‘smart phones’ the ‘smart’ should reflect the intelligence of the phone itself, rather than the user?  It wouldn’t take a genius to realise that messages like, “Hey Dyl, would you be” and “Of course, I’ll meet you at” aren’t exactly messages that I’d be saving to revisit at a later stage.  Unless you have an unprecedented love of unfinished sentences, it’s certainly a feature which most people could do without.

But fortunately The Plague began to pass and I decided that in an effort to remain healthy on this marginally better day, I should attempt to drink a litre of peach fruit juice.  Fruit is meant to be good for you, so soaking my insides with health in liquid form seemed like a good idea.  And if I didn’t get better from drinking a litre of peach fruit juice, then at the very least I’d know I’d go quite well with cream, which is something that I’ve always wanted to be able to put on my CV.

What I find strange about fruit juice is that most companies producing it don’t seem too sure of what is going in to their final product.  I understand that you have to ad other fruit juice into the equation to get your desired flavour, but I expect a bit more of a calculated effort in how they go about it.  To read ‘peach juice, blended with grape and/or apple and/or pear juice’ doesn’t exactly display the amount of confidence and precision I’d expect from a company who is meant to know what they’re doing.  What exactly is happening in the juice creating process which is producing this amount of uncertainty?  Is this like The Elves and the Shoemaker – are Ceres struggling to pay their rent, and night after night, elves are making their juice for them, and in the morning a bewildered group of Ceres executives find themselves incredibly grateful but in no rush to ask questions?

Or are they just incredibly forgetful?  To cover this lack of memory, are they one step from doing away with single fruit flavours and only supplying a range of fruit medleys with ambiguous titles which enable them a certain amount of leniency when it comes to the contents?  Because let’s face it, no-one really knows exactly what is in ‘Secrets of the Valley’, and that’s probably precisely what we should expect from a juice named after documentaries about Native Americans.

Or maybe they do know what goes into their fruit juices, but when texting the information over to the people who do their packaging, they got halfway through their sentence and