Whilst drinking my morning dose of
Sunny Delight - don't feel sad for me, I know the partnership I'm getting into - a thought struck me, coming from the bleak depths of my
Tory mind. Why don't Procter & Gamble just
cut to the chase, simplify things, ditch the liquid and just sell
sugar to children? 100 per cent pure
cane sugar, nothing else, sold in 500ml bottles. Dyed in a variety of attractive colours. They could get the
Sugababes to do a song in the adverts, and call the product 'Suga', or 'Sugatots' or something like that.
I mean, kids today are used to calories, they suck them up all the time, and their children will be totally immune. Calories will go straight through their bodies. They will be shitting calories. Rats down in the sewers and will eat highly-calorific turds and will grow to giant size, but that's a problem for future generations to deal with. These hyper-children will have to eat huge amounts of food just to keep warm, but the human stomach is only so large, and so they'll have to eat highly calorific food, and what food is more calorific than pure sugar? Petrol, perhaps, but human stomachs can't deal with petrol, at least not yet.
Modern life in the western world is a constant struggle between two opposing forces. On the one hand, we want to stuff ourselves, and on the other hand we don't want to get fat. Sugar is the ideal solution; you can eat it all day long without becoming full up - because it dissolves, silly - and it has no fat at all. You know you want it. The more you eat, the more exercise you will be able to do, and the thinner you will become. It's like coffee, without the milk or the coffee. Sugar will be our Saviour.
P&G could also market an alcoholic version that's partially dissolved in malt liquor, with radio advertising featuring early hip-hop tracks by Ice Cube, Yo-Yo and the Geto Boys. Also, there could be an 'adult' version that's mixed with honey - call it 'Sugahoney', perhaps - with advertising that features Sophie Dahl and Kate Dillon being smeared in the stuff whilst wrestling naked on a transparent plastic sheet, and after a fortnight the publicists could let slip to the newspapers that drug users inject it with heroin in order to take the taste away.
That's how I would market it, anyway. Restrictions on advertising and products are nonsense and should be removed, as indeed they will be by progress and time; if people want to kill their bodies and brains, and those of their children, let them. I believe that it was common in the Victorian era for children to be placated with laudanum, a derivative of opium - a perfume advertised with some success by the aforementioned Ms Dahl - and whilst opium is unfortunately nowadays illegal, sugar is not. There has to be some way to keep the kids amused and out of trouble, and given that beating, capital punishment and baby farming are similarly restricted - a terrible mistake, one that will be rectified when the Conservative Party is next in power, mark my words - sugar is the best available solution. The sugar will allow the children to enjoy life all the more, and they will probably talk much faster and shake a lot, but that's okay because it's natural. There's nothing artificial in sugar. It comes straight from God's nipple.