Mud On the Road: Look! I Made Green

With Apologies to Lord Percy

Sunday, 8^th January 2017. 14.30.

Look! I have made green.

I've been given a Nutribullet raw food blender. It’s taken Him and me two weeks of intensive research and extreme shopping to reach the moment today when we finally felt confident enough to invert the plastic thingummy, press down hard on the electrical housing and produce our first home-made, whole food smoothie.

According to the evangelical Nutribullet booklets, we have only to sip from the cup of our home-made smoothie and we will cross over into a promised

land where Nutribullet types are forever young, fit and healthy and World Peace has been secured.

15.00

We’ve made the smoothie. Now we just have to drink it.

15.30.

The smoothie pictured in the booklet is an attractive blackberry colour.

Our smoothie is grey-brown.

It is not especially smooth.

It is gritty.

It is like liquid concrete.

NB As a means of getting our smoothie into your mouth, sucking works better than sipping.

We’ve made it and so we drink it anyway.

It tastes, sort of, healthy-ish.

16.00 – I make a second one.

I branch out and make a second one. The second smoothie has no nuts or seeds. Only spinach, cucumber, mint, apples and ginger. And lime. It sounds delicious. I am sure it will be delicious. To make sure it is delicious, I add more spinach. And a bit more cucumber. I flip the plastic cup over like a practised mixologist, fix it into its housing and press down hard to pulse. I am become The Pulveriser.

‘Look,’ I say proudly to Shedley. ‘I have made green.’

And it is oh so very green. Like, Alice on her big adventure, we drink the green.

It's exceedingly fibrous. Thin filament strands of green are lodged in my teeth. I feel chlorophyll spring within me, start like sap in my veins.

If we drink enough green we will photosynthesise.

I decide to make a third. A different colour this time. I reach for a carrot.

I have also made grey-brown

7 hours later.

We appear to have survived first contact with the Nutribullet though we can’t guarantee our survival for another 53 hours.

This is because it can take up to 53 hours for a single nut to pass through the digestive tract of a human body. I read it online. Today we have emptied more nuts and seeds into our bodily cavities today than most squirrel families consume in a year.

I transgressed against one of the Nutribullet’s Commandments which warn you that, if eaten whole and in sufficient quantities apples will kill you thanks to the cyanide-forming amygdalin contained within their pips.

We have attacked our poor unsuspecting insides with an arsenal of wholefood including cyanide forming apple pips. The night ahead may be a long one.

Monday 9^th January. 13.00 The Bad Thoughts

Recordable outcomes for the benefit of the Nutribullet experiment, must include the fact that I woke eight times in the night. But it was a Sunday night so that was not unusual and, on each occasion, I went straight back to sleep. Which was unusual.

Usually, on a Sunday night if I wake up I stay awake. Usually with my mouth and my eyes wide open in a silent scream of abject terror. I can't go back to sleep because I am terrified I won't go back to sleep and will feel tired at work all day and cumulatively tired therefore for the rest of the week.

The fear of feeling so very very tired eradicates sleep and brings on the Bad Thoughts which, like an entire cavalry charge, gallop thunderously about in my head until exactly 6.45 am when I suddenly feel inexplicably drowsy and drift off into the deepest sleep from which nothing and no-one can rouse me.

Last night none of this happened. We both slept well. Despite having nuked our digestive systems with enough vegetation to reforest the Congo.

19.00 Après Nous, Le Déluge

The house has not fared so well. The corners and spaces that had revealed themselves once the Christmas tree and decorations and fairy lights had been tidied away, have been buried all over again, this time by a tsunami of whole food ingredients for the Nutribullet.

Wherever you look there are bags of spinach and loose carrots and avocados and pears and bananas. Seedless grapes have rolled under the microwave, cox apples loll about by the kettle. Cartons of almond milk which I've decided I don't like and cartons of coconut water which I've decided I do, are blocking access to the washing machine.

Like a demented hamster, I've had to hoard all the nuts in the cupboard under the stairs where I'll forget I've put them. We'll search fruitlessly for months and then suddenly discover the cache in December when we go to fetch the fairy lights and decorations for the tree. By which time they'll have passed their sell by dates.

But we won’t mind by then because we'll have been transmogrified by gallons of slightly gritty Green, thanks to which we will be reaping the rewards of perpetual youth and physical vigour and that old chestnut, World Peace.