Look at the automated workmanship on that automated blister packaging

I suffer from chronic heartburn. I’m in the pub and I’ve run out of indigestion medicine. There are two options:

1. Walk nearly TEN whole minutes to the nearest shop and come back with some Rennies.*

2. Drink my way through it by indulging in a feminine drink which will get me mocked every time I drink it – Baileys.

Lets examine these two terrifying possibilities:

1. I go to the shop to buy Rennies. On the way I get cold and wet and feel lonely existential city-dweller angst. I get to the shop and discover Rennie Ice.

This is probably the most exciting thing to happen to indigestion remedies in the last year – and after a fifteen minute conversation with the old man at the counter about Burgopak’s investment in the new automated packing technology required to package Rennie Ice, I return to the pub.

When I reach the pub, my heartburn has gone, but all I can think about is the sophisticated machinery that has crafted these blister packets of chalky goodness. I try to engage my compatriots on this exciting new topic, but in the time I have been away they have turned from being sociable to drunk. All they want to talk about now is boobies, poker and football. They have no time for my boring stories about pharmaceutical packaging.

I leave, early, dejected and sober.

I return home, watch The Vicar of Dibley and cry as I choke one out to blank-eyed blond Emma Chambers while avoiding the erection-killing gaze of Dawn French. I cry some more as I go to bed, cured of hearburn but desolate to my core.

Baileys: Drink it or you’ll end up masturbating to The Vicar of Dibley

2. I drink a Baileys. Everyone who sees me mocks my choice of drink. My heartburn seems to drift away, though I cannot be sure if it is the milky effect of Baileys or me now having mixed my drinks and being too drunk to notice my heartburn.

I am now very drunk. So drunk that I can even hold a stilted conversation about football. I knock someone’s drink over. We go for some fried chicken which I wolf down. A salad fight gets us thrown out of the take-away.

I pass out at home, wake up (still drunk) and have a bacon sandwich. Which gives me heartburn.

The choice is clear – drink Baileys or face spiritual annihilation.
*I’m discounting Gaviscon tablets because they have a texture like gritty snot, and Settlers because they have an after-taste like sucking exhaust fumes.