WHO ARE YOU? WHO, WHO, WHO, WHO [510]

Copyright: Spartina Productions / Busboy Productions / CBS Broadcasting Inc.

Following on from my discussion about “The One Show”, and with “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” ending in May 2026, I am not likely to become famous enough in time to answer the “Colbert Questionert”, a litmus test made of questions that makes a guest truly known, with a title punning on the pronunciation of the host’s name.

While I have already said I don’t usually watch the American chat shows for their interviews, I make an exception for this feature to see how various people answer the same questions, and whether they see each question as a need to make a snap judgement, or whether it gives pause to ruminate, or another chance to perform. Either way, I can see the “Colbert Questionert” continuing to the podcast that Colbert will inevitably do next - maybe I will be properly answer it someday.

I imagine some questions (or answers) are cut for time, so not all the following questions are heard being asked to everyone, and so I have no guarantee of this being a complete list of all the questions. I treated them as snap judgments, so these answers are as true as I can make them.

Best sandwich?

In alphabetical order: chicken, lettuce, salad cream, tomato.

 

What is the scariest animal?

If not man, then spiders.

 

Apples or oranges?

Oranges: messier to deal with, but a softer, less acidic taste. You don’t really get apple-flavoured chocolate.

 

What was your first concert?

The Cross, at Gosport Festival in July 1993. It was the solo / “other band” project of Roger Taylor, the drummer from Queen, with lots of guests. With it still not being long since Freddie Mercury died, it was undeniably thrilling to clap and hold your arms out to the chorus of “Radio Gaga”, as the man who wrote it sang it to you.

 

Cats or dogs?

Not a pet person, but cats.

 

What's one thing you own that you really should throw out?

A small circular pillow with a painting of a hedgehog printed on it, a runner-up prize from a family Christmas Day quiz some years ago.

 

Have you ever asked someone for their autograph?

Yes, from Paul Gannon & Eli Silverman of the "CheapShow" podcast for their vinyl album, but in a non-committal “if you want to” kind of way - of course they did.

 

What do you think happens when we die?

My energy is redistributed, and things carry on from there.

 

Favourite action movie?

“The Matrix”, a choice apparently shared with both Sandra Bullock and Matt Damon.

 

Window or aisle?

On a bus or coach: window. On a plane: aisle.

 

Favourite smell?

Real vanilla.

 

Least favourite smell?

Excrement of any kind.

 

Exercise: worth it?

Disguise it as a good walk, then I’m sold.

 

Flat or sparkling?

Flat - if a “still” Diet Coke ever comes to market, I will be first in line.

 

Most used app on your phone? 

Its web browser, for nearly two thirds of the time, constantly reading and searching for things.

 

You get one song to listen to for the rest of your life: what is it? (You can listen to music whenever you like, but when you do, it is only this song.)

“Station to Station” by David Bowie, specifically from his “Stage” live album – the exhilarating rush of “woo-hoo-hoo-hoo, it’s too late” by its end makes it a better version for me than the original studio version.

 

What number am I thinking of?

Fourteen. (I know it’s wrong, it’s always wrong.)

 

Describe the rest of your life in 5 words?

Wouldn’t I like to know.

 

Congratulations, I am known.

AND IT TASTES LIKE LEMONADE [402]

 

For a British person on holiday in the United States, I don’t think we encountered a single situation over five days in New York where British and American words and idioms became confused – I think we absorbed the required knowledge when our plane entered US air space. 

 

The only one we apparently missed was what we mean when we talk about lemonade.

 

Avoiding the smog [https://www.leighspence.net/2023/06/get-into-my-big-black-car-401.html], we took shelter in the Hard Rock Café in Times Square, formerly the lobby of the Paramount theatre, which is itself now office space. I had a Diet Coke with my Legendary Steak Burger, and when I was asked about another drink, I asked for a lemonade. Upon this, the server leapt into a routine about how, when British people ask for lemonade, what they actually want is Sprite, something that must have happened many times. I was asked if I wanted was Sprite, and I decided to say yes.

 

I was already aware that American lemonade is characteristically cloudy, still and sweet, made with fresh lemons, and is known as “cloudy lemonade” in the UK. “Our” lemonade is clear, fizzy and has a sharper, more citric taste and, as I now know, is not routinely sold in the United States, meaning the country has no reason to make the distinction. One drink I hoped to find while there was Arizona Ice Tea’s half-tea, half-lemonade “Arnold Palmer”, named after the golfer – in fact, it was a US gallon (3.78 litre) bottle that lasted the week, and it was lovely and sweet overall, despite the taste of the tea, well, clouding the lemonade. This is more than I could say for orange Fanta, the US version of which contains no juice, has the same sunset yellow colour as Lucozade and Irn-Bru, and tasted like them as well.

 

Then there is Sprite, which is not lemonade. Introduced in 1959 by Coca-Cola in West Germany as a clear, coloured, lemon-flavoured variant of Fanta, it was introduced into the US two years later as a competitor to 7-Up. Labels on Sprite bottles and cans term it a lemon-lime soda, but previous US packaging created a word: “Great Lymon Taste!” I since found that one US variation of the drink is “lymonade” – you can buy Sprite pre-mixed with lemonade, with “Sprite Lymonade Legacy” adding strawberry into the mix. 

 

I wish I known about Sprite Lymonade before we ate at Hard Rock Café – it would have been the best of both worlds.

A WHOLE LOT OF FUN, PRIZES TO BE WON [253]

Coke Zone was the name of a loyalty points scheme operated by Coca-Cola from 2008 to 2013 across its range of soft drinks. By collecting codes printed on bottles, boxes and can ring pulls, the points you accumulate could buy money-off vouchers to use in stores, magazine subscriptions, cinema tickets and, if you were lucky, expensive electrical items like games consoles and cameras.

I have great memories of Coke Zone. Diet Coke is still my favourite drink, and because I rarely ever drink anything alcoholic, Diet Coke is often all I ever drink, apart from water. Introducing a loyalty scheme to a product for which I was already a loyal customer was very welcome indeed.

To be honest, I practically fleeced Coca-Cola when they ran Coke Zone. I diligently collected the codes to enter on their website to collect the points, and friends and work colleagues that knew I was collecting the codes gave me their bottles and cans to throw away, after I wrote the codes down. You were only allowed to collect fifty points per week, and while a 330ml can gave you one point, a 500ml bottle gave you two, and a multipack scored five points, I often reached their weekly limit due to the codes I was given.

In return, I received many things: 100 points could be exchanged for £5 vouchers to use at HMV to buy CDs and DVDs – before 2011, when HMV also owned the bookshop chain Waterstones, I could redeem them for books as well. I received quite a few tickets to watch films at my local cinema, also at 100 points each. I had a year’s free subscription to the film magazine “Empire.” I also had a money-off voucher for a clothes shop, which I remembered using on a pair of shorts.

The high point was when I actually caught a big-ticket item on the Coke Zone website, which often disappeared as quickly as they appeared: on a day off from work, having collected enough points to participate, I spent 600 points to buy a Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-T90 camera, which cost about £250 in 2009 – it was either one of them, or an Xbox 360 console. I still own and use this camera.

When Coca-Cola started to wind down Coke Zone in 2013, the offers had become less enticing – increased participation from people in the points scheme had caused inflation, with vouchers costing 100 points having increased to 150, then 200 points, while larger items, previously costing over a thousand points, were replaced with prize draws, spending fewer points to enter. Coca-Cola provided a final round of larger products to burn up the piles of points that some, like me, had amassed – I bought a nineteen-inch Sony Bravia television which, like the camera four years earlier, would have costed around £250, but costed 1,500 points. Once Coke Zone finally closed, I had received prizes and vouchers worth a total of over £650.

I have never been that lucky since, although I rarely enter any competitions. However, I have benefitted from other points reward schemes: HMV started their own, Pure HMV, whose money-off vouchers came in good use when I realised I needed David Bowie’s complete discography after he died. Like Tesco Clubcard and the Boots Advantage card, my loyalty to buying products from them that I could have bought elsewhere is being rewarded, rather than buying one brand instead of another – I guess the 1980s “cola wars” between Coke and Pepsi never really ended. Meanwhile, my bank introduced a current account in 2014 that offered its own yearly choice of rewards, one of which was six free cinema tickets per year. I have paid to watch a film in a cinema only a few times in the last ten years, and one of those times was for “Cats.”

My Coke Zone online login apparently still works, but Coca-Cola’s website now only offers product news and the occasional competition, which is perhaps all it should ever have done. Coca-Cola is a brand that does not need to advertise as much as other products, such is its place in popular culture – I wish I could find a copy of the poster I once saw that shows a Coke bottle with the slogan, “And what would you like to eat?” They only need to advertise to remind people they are there, which is why you see Coca-Cola ads most often at Christmas, Easter and during the summer.

Fortunately for Coca-Cola, I would have continued drinking Diet Coke regardless of whether Coke Zone existed, but I took advantage of it while it was there. My continual loyalty to them has since been measured in pounds Sterling, rather than points.

A GREEN PLASTIC WATERING CAN [161]

Arriving at the checkout in my local Ikea, waiting to pay for a wooden stool and some paper drinking straws, I looked to my left in disbelief. The area had been piled high with one impulse purchase, like you would find chocolate bars when you pay at a supermarket. However, what Ikea had was a giant cube, packed with tiny plastic potted Jurassic succulent plants, in tiny plastic pots, with a layer of fake plastic soil, for only 95p each.

I laughed, because that was all I could do, apart from buy one and take it home. Some weeks later, I found another of these things sticking out from an array of real plants, perhaps the result of a customer realising what they were doing, and buying a proper one. It stuck out badly – something looking more life-like would cost far more, organic or not. I bought that one as well. They are now both at work, taking the place of a real Jurassic plant I thought had died, but thrived once I had put it away in a drawer, the deprivation of water and light forcing it to grow like rhubarb. That plant is still alive, while its replacements never were.

The Ikea plant is part of a range that uses the name “Fejka,” the Swedish word for “fake,” perhaps the most straightforward name they have ever used. The demonstration photographs on their website show it taking up space in a bathroom, and on a shelf, much like the “serving suggestion” picture on a microwave meal pack means “on a plate.”

Why does this plastic plant exist? We are slowly moving away from single-use plastic, hence my buying the paper straws, but this plant is so small, and so cheap, it approaches disposability, costing less than a bottle of Diet Coke. They are almost made of the same kinds of plastic, although ethyl vinyl acetate (EVA), used to give the plant its rubbery texture, is more likely to be used in shoes and household appliances. The plant can be recycled, but not a single part of it is biodegradable, requiring more energy to make something else from it. The idea should not be to make it easy for the owner to throw the plant away if they don’t need or want it anymore, especially when its small size (14 cm tall, with a 6 cm diameter pot), indicates this is a plant that cannot get any bigger.

Plastic plants feel a step too far now, as if Dr. Seuss had never written “The Lorax,” and Sir David Attenborough never returned to making nature programmes – he used to be controller of BBC Two, creating programme strands such as “Horizon” and “The Natural World.” This is even before you consider its position as postmodern simulacra – do you buy the fake plant to replace the experience of owning the real thing, or could you just not be bothered to take care of a real one? It would have been simple enough to spend £2 to buy a real plant, and remember to take care of it, like owning a goldfish. Here is my problem: I have never owned a pet, I thought my real plant had died, and I have added to the plastic problem that we all have. I guess I am stuck with my two Fejkas, unless they somehow start absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen - oh yeah, no fake photosynthesis, as even the soil is fake.

JUST FOR THE TASTE OF IT [133]

Every so often, I will look in a shop that purports to sell American candy and drinks, or look online, to see if they have cans of Tab, the original Diet Coke, for sale. It has been over two years since I last tasted Tab, and over two years since the shop I bought it from had closed. A seller on Amazon is apparently selling two cases of twelve cans, imported to the UK, for nearly £60 – this is approaching wine prices, but unless I can find something for less, it may be my last resort. Is it the taste, or the thrill of the chase, that keeps me looking?

It’s not just me – even in its country of origin, people are getting desperate. Stories have been running about the largest independent distributor of Coca-Cola drinks in the US, covering fourteen states, deciding to discontinue Tab. With what remains on store shelves, supplies are drying up, and the search for its delightfully bitter aftertaste – a result of sweetening with saccharine, instead of the smoother taste of aspartame – continues into neighbouring states, and further afield.

Really, it’s not that surprising that Tab is easier to find – its original success threatened its company’s brand. Coca-Cola introduced Tab in 1963 as a zero-calorie alternative to, well, itself. It’s pink-coloured can was marketed to women, and its name, originally chosen from a computer printout of random letter combinations, because the name “Diet Coke” was considered heresy to the original drink at the time, was marketed to everyone with their weight on their mind. All of Coca-Cola’s zero-calorie drinks used the Tab name in the 1970s, including what became the diet versions of Sprite and orange Fanta.

However, diet Coke (originally with a small “d,” with the strapline “just for the taste of it”) was launched in 1982 at the point where the original Coke was losing out to the growing market of diet drinks – there was a diet Pepsi by then too. The taste was enough, making Diet Coke the fourth-biggest drink in the US by the end of 1983, and just to show the power of the Coca-Cola brand, taste tests showed people favoured Diet Coke from vending machines even when the cans actually contained Tab – no wonder present Tab cans take pains to tell you where they came from.

However, taste tests can lead you down a blind alley. The Tab formula was changed in 1984 to use the smoother-tasting aspartame, as used in Diet Coke, and an outcry reversed it – saccharine is just part of the taste. The New Coke debacle of 1985 repeated it, because more people said, in tests, they preferred a sugary version of Diet Coke. In both cases, habits were changed, and taste buds went mad. Now, in the face of replacing Tab with Diet Coke because you cannot get Tab anymore, the same thing will happen.

I would like to see where this goes. In the UK, there has been a conspiracy on social media that Coca-Cola Cherry has been withdrawn, when this is not the case – that doesn’t bother me, I have only ever bought it by accident. However, should something only receive a resurgence when there is a threat to take it away? I would rather not spend £60 on soft drinks, I know that much.

WHEN I SEE AN ELEPHANT FLY [125]

On 3^rd July 2018, Southwark Council approved the demolition of the Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre and surrounding buildings, to be replaced by a mix of low-cost apartments, student flats, retail and leisure space. The owners of the site intend to close the centre by 31^stMarch 2019, with its tenants being offered lower rent and help moving to other sites in the meantime. How nice.

I have only visited the Elephant & Castle once before, around twenty years ago, when my brother played ice hockey. We must have parked under the shopping centre, then walked across to the venue, passing through the centre to get supplies. The reputation the Elephant & Castle has gained as being a kind of, well, white elephant probably didn’t make an effect on us at the time, as we lived close to the Tricorn Shopcentre in Portsmouth, a Brutalist concrete construction routinely labelled the worst building in Britain, until it was demolished in 2005, its bazaar of dark corners replaced by a flat car park, ready for a development that will actually get built.

Having already planned a trip to London, and having been reminded of the place, I took the Northern Line to Elephant & Castle, and immediately got lost – the directions up into the centre took me through a platform for the Bakerloo Line, also based under the centre. I can see why Transport for London wants a better Underground station as part of the new development, but they could sort the directions of some arrows first.

Approaching the entrance to the Elephant & Castle, I got the video camera on my phone ready, for I was expecting a dead shopping mall – the building has been characterised as having been run into the ground since it opened in 1965, as one of the first shopping malls in the UK. The documents published by Southwark Council on the day of its decision noted this was a concern found during the public consultation, although the neglect was perceived as deliberate, due to the centre having been a target for redevelopment opportunities for years. Therefore, I was expecting some sort of carnage. I walked in, and after a few seconds, I put my phone away...

The place was fine.

In fact, the Elephant & Castle was clean, if a little dark, and while there were empty shop spaces, there was an entire High Street inside, including a Tesco, WH Smith, Boots, Lloyds Bank, Greggs, Clarks Shoes, Peacocks, Poundland, Shoe Zone, and many other independent fashion and food stores contributing to the heady aroma that hits you when you walk inside – I was expecting the stench of damp and mould, and there was none.

There are two other tell-tale signs I have picked up from other dead shopping malls: while the escalators to the top floor were not switched on when I walked in (at 9.45am on a Friday morning), I put this down to the bingo hall and bowling alley not yet having opened – either that, or people were using the stairs. Meanwhile, the vending machines worked, selling Diet Coke for less than I expected. Along with the multicoloured fibreglass elephants dotted about the place, I approve. (The elephant statue outside the entrance, rescued from the pub that gave its name to the area, used to be located inside.)

You can see that more expensive shops may have been there before – there certainly was a H. Samuel jeweller at one point – but the uncertainty over the centre's future perhaps restricts bigger brands that want more certainty. Another bank, Santander, announced plans to close its branch, mainly due to most of its customers also using alternative places, but it produced a leaflet explaining how it is going to support the community ahead of this change.

That is what the closure of Elephant & Castle feels like – it is a community centre that is formed out of its shops, away from the intention of being merely a retail experience. The new development – it is led by Delancey, which built the 2012 Olympic athletes’ village - has to give first refusal to a bingo hall operator, regardless of how modern the area will look, but the bowling alley is less important. A £634,000 fund has been created to help independent retailers move out, but Tesco, which has been there almost since day one in 1965, will have to sort itself out.

The documents supplied by Southwark Council on 3rd July, available on their website, are exhaustive, detailing over their 250 pages how every single possible consideration, when a building project is proposed, needs an answer, from dust and vibration during the building work, to consideration of heritage sites, archaeology, effects on various sectors of the population, and in answering the concerns of all those that answered their consultation. From reading it, I guess the case for demolishing Elephant & Castle has been made, for progress has to be made, and with the centre sticking out among more modern buildings, time has finally run out...

Like hell it has: the decision to demolish is still subject to legal agreements being drawn up, and Historic England has to consider both an application to have the centre listed, which didn’t work for the Coronet theatre, and an application from Delancey to prevent it from being listed. This story is not over, not least after reading this quote from Fiona Colley, a Southwark council cabinet member for regeneration, which described Elephant & Castle as the “final piece in the jigsaw for regeneration.” She continued:

“As the options for refurbishment were developed further we were less and less happy with how the scheme would fit in with the rest of the area’s high-quality designs. The council has now rejected the earlier options to retain some parts of the original building and insist on full demolition.”

Leaving the Elephant & Castle, I got the feeling that, with a centre that already has the available space to do something good, or could be renovated, it sounds like anyone who wanted it demolished had talked themselves into doing it. The centre was part of the project to rebuild London after the Second World War and, apparently, that will never end – it’s either a case of make do or mend, or if it ain’t broke, break it.

LIFE’S A GAS [116]

So much for adults teaching children where food comes from, for we did not realise on what we relied for our drink.

The UK’s shortage of carbon dioxide has remained among the top news stories for the last two weeks, due to demand outstripping supply. However, just as when KFC ran out of chicken when changing their distributor [link], the disruption in CO₂ supply could have been foreseen: summer plus World Cup equals beer and barbecue, with CO₂ used to provide fizz to the beer, while food has a longer shelf life free of mould.

Heineken was the first company to warn of problems, although competitor AB Inbev, owners of Budweiser, Stella Artois and Foster’s, are less affected because their brewing process reuses CO₂. Coca-Cola announced it was reducing production for a while, as carbonated water is only added to the US-made syrup at the bottling plants, and supermarkets started rationing sales of some products as a precautionary measure.

However, once Warburtons, the UK’s largest producer of crumpets, halted production at two of its four plants after running out altogether, and once the Food and Drink Federation starts to say, "If a similar issue were to affect the water industry... then you feel government would be acting with far greater urgency," you do have to wonder why this headless-chicken-running doesn’t happen more often.

There are lessons to be learnt by everyone here, as I had never given thought to the process by which a gas – one of the two I can make myself - is produced en masse, let alone how finds its way into my Diet Coke.

Five plants in the UK produce the majority of the CO₂ it uses, based in Ipswich, Manchester, Ince, Wilton and Billingham. However, the primary use of these plants is to produce ammonia, a compound of nitrogen, from air, and hydrogen (NH₃), where CO₂ is a by-product of the process used to create it – the gas captured is then purified and sold as gas, refrigerated liquid or dry ice. The ammonia is used in fertiliser – and here is the problem, because ammonia is the reason for building the plants, with CO₂ becoming a lucrative side business.

At the time of writing, the plants are reopening, following a shutdown period for maintenance purposes – the plants in Manchester and Ince have restarted, with the others to follow. The shutdown was planned, as only so much ammonia is required by the fertiliser industry, but the increased demand for CO₂ means the food and drink industry is relying on the production cycle of the fertiliser industry. This is not in the same manner as any industries relying on electricity, as electricity is still as much of a utility as gas and water, despite the industry required to fulfil that need – the CO₂ is needed, and it’s just as well that someone can provide it.

It is inefficient to distil CO₂ from air, but the race is on to improve: for example, the Swiss start-up company Climeworks opened the first direct air capture plant in June 2017 with the intention of proving the concept is worth pursuing.  The plant currently feeds its CO₂ back into a greenhouse to increase food production, but the eventual goal is to assist in producing carbon-neutral fuels. Other methods being developed focus on producing cells that can replicate photosynthesis. However, the current production cost of producing a ton of CO₂ is $600 for Climeworks, versus $80 per ton using the capture method deployed at the ammonia plants, while competing with other fuel sources require that amount to be virtually zero.

The alternative is less useful – you can buy canisters of “food fresh nitrogen” (N₂) to use in food packaging, the most well-known example being bags of Walkers crisps, while users of Tupperware already know storing food in a vacuum is also effective. However, while the slightly tart taste of “sparkling” carbonated water is due to CO₂ bonding with some water molecules to form carbonic acid (H₂CO₃), too much nitrogen in water is harmful to life, and is never added, with only a few milligrams of nitrates found in mineral water.

In the UK, all we can do right now is wait for fertiliser production to reach normal levels, and probably find something else to drink and eat in the meantime.