Coke

Some things here are just hard to fathom. England has a different sized 2l soft drink bottle than that in Australia. It is longer and narrower, like a slightly oversized 1.25l bottle. Ideally, it’s a great shape—the narrower shape means that there is a smaller surface area on the face of the liquid in contact with the air which should mean that it goes flat just slightly more slowly than the Australian version.

However.

The English seem to prefer small fridges. We were very pleased (and somewhat relieved) to discover when we got here that the fridge in our unit was not the bar fridge that we had been expecting. But it is still quite small. So far every fridge I’ve seen would be considered smallish by Australian standards.

This makes a certain degree of sense. English fruit and veges don’t seem to have much of a shelf life—due no doubt to the fact that a lot of it is imported. And the quality of the fruit and veges is, with rare exception (like potatoes, which are the nicest roast potatoe variety I’ve tasted), of a quality slightly lower than that in a substandard Woolworths or Coles (and costing more of course). So you don’t buy a week’s worth of groceries. One buys groceries for a couple of days (unless you do what a number of the English seem to have done, and just despaired of cooking with these dubiously fresh ingredients and buy ready made meals, of which there are a lot). Hence, a smaller fridge makes good sense.

Except.

Why have a long soft drink bottle when you only have small fridges? You cannot stand it upright, it has to be laid down flat. (Believe me, I’ve tried, there is no way to have 2l coke in the fridge standing upright.) This means that as soon as any coke is taken out of the bottle, the entire length of the bottle becomes the surface area exposed to air, speeding up the process whereby the soft drink becomes flat quite considerably.

I like to drink coke. Yet, I can’t drink it fast enough to prevent the last 1/3 of the bottle being about as flat as the landscape around here.

So why have a bottle that cannot fit in the average fridge door or the average top shelf? MDB