Tales from the watercooler: Sour taste of Irn-Bru removal

Irn-Bru also contains properties which assist in the rapid and soothing dissipation of the most brutal of hangover

(Rex Features)

Possibly due to next month’s industrial action by London Underground staff, this week I was informed (in a somewhat terse tweet) by Water Cooler’s clearly-more-militant-than-I-had-assumed group of artisan news monitors that they were no longer willing to scan the web for interesting happenings to bring to my attention.

So, in my new non-union “ambassador” role of stand-in news gatherer, I present my first find. This week, Canadian food authorities ordered a shopkeeper to stop selling Irn-Bru, as it contains “illegal” additives. Now, I’m not sure how many of you have sampled Scotland’s bright orange, fizzy pop. For the unfamiliar, it tastes a little like barley sugar sweets in liquid form, a factor which in no way contributes to there being currently only seven unfilled molars in the land of my birth.

Interestingly enough, Irn-Bru also contains properties which assist in the rapid and soothing dissipation of the most brutal of hangovers. Indeed, one need only spot a bottle of “Bru” on a work colleague’s desk of a morning to know that he probably didn’t spend the night at a Baptist prayer meeting.

So come on, Canada. Free the Bru. With the amount of homesick expat Scots in your country, taking away their hangover medicine could be asking for trouble.

Twitter.com: DonaldAMacInnes