I started drinking beetroot juice a while ago.
At first I hated the taste, but it’s grown on me. Beetroot juice with a bit of ginger in it is even better. It’s meant to be fabulously good for you. It fights free radicals, which sounds like it’s a bad thing, except free radicals aren’t people like Will Self or of course, me, but stuff that acts like rust on your skin, oxidising it so I’d have to spend much more on moisturiser and being generally vain than I already do. And I don’t at this point, actually want to talk about what happened in June with the sales girl in Bond Street on a really hot day. It was expensive though. Like,
Like, RARELY...
So, beetroot juice, which oddly you never find in Poundland or anywhere at much under £2.50 a litre. Except oddly this week in Saxmundham Tesco. Now to be fair, I hardly ever go there. But I was feeling thrifty and economical (it has to happen once a year, after all. Law of averages) and I was price comparing between there and the Waitrose literally across the road.
Tesco won on price, with organic beetroot juice from the same local maker nearly 70p a litre cheaper than Waitrose. I suspect because nobody in Tesco buys organic beetroot juice and they were trying to get rid of it in favour of stuff people actually do give their cash for.
But they don’t tell you the thing about beetroot juice. Nobody does.
You drink it. Half a pint of it. It’s good for you. If you don’t breathe at the same time it’s actually an ok taste. (No, I don’t know how that works). You feel you’ve drunk something that’s going to make life better, make your teeth whiter, make you feel like someone in a cornflakes ad on TV 20 years ago. Almost refreshed. You sort-of spring out of bed, just avoiding stepping on the belt buckle on your jeans you dropped on the floor because you didn’t have company. You go to the bathroom and do the things everyone always does. And then you think:
OMG I’M GOING TO BE DEAD IN THREE DAYS!!!!
Because what they don’t tell you, the thing they don’t put a BIG warning about on the bottle is this: drinking half a pint of beetroot jiuce turns your urine scarlet.
It’s totally harmless. Except it doesn’t look that way. And you can’t mention it to anybody. What do you say?
“You know that thing with your best friend I didn’t tell you about, look, I’m going to be dead soon.”
“You know that time I was mean to you about – look, I’m going to be dead soon.”
“You know that £5 I owe you, look, I’m going to be dead soon.”
“You know how I’ve always fancied your wife, look, I’m going to be dead soon.”
And luckily, by the time you’ve not said any of these things, you’ve Googled it. But it’s still worrying. A real, serious, sick in your stomach, maths test in the morning bloody red bleeding worry.
And I wish they’d just TELL you…….
