Cavan Cola!

West Cavan's representative literate person over at Cavantucky cheered me up no end today when I went there and discovered that a campaign has started to get Cavan Cola back on the market.

As the saying goes, I was reared on Cavan Cola. Most people say that sort of thing in jest or as a figure of speech but no, I really was reared on it as there was never a drop of milk in the house and my mother was big into smoking crack. Only messing.

For those of you unfamiliar and in thrall to sterotypes, it was just a harmless soft drink and not some crazy 90% home brew hooch distilled in the hills by barefoot, slack-jawed yokels in dungarees. Looking squinty eyed and lustily at farm animals.

Now I know 'Cavan Cola' doesn't exactly conjure images of some sort of elixir of youth but it was actually great stuff, a sort of Smithwicks for apprentices. It had a deep brown ruddy colour (like the local tap water) and a frothy head like the suds of a freshly poured bottle of Guinness. Legions of Cavan children grew up deliberately pouring it much too quickly into pint glasses before taking big mouthfuls and smacking the glass down on the table with a big 'aaahhhhhhhh,' before wiping their cola moustaches away and burping something about the saving the hay, as they tried to imitate their Daddies down the pub.

I don't know why they ever took it off the market, as long as kids love sugar, which is as long as wasps will, it was always going to keep selling. Then again, if it was turning profit they'd never have shelved it. Rumour had it that the dastardly laboratory boffins over in Brussels discovered banned ingredients in it and therefore ordered it out of production. Banned ingredients means E123, by the way, nothing sinister like turpentine or rat poison.

Never mind that kids had to be peeled off the ceiling after drinking a few bottles of it, this is part of our heritage. Well, my heritage really, but I don't mind sharing. Between Smithwicks being about as cool as being in the Girl Guides, and now Cavan Cola's continuing exile, I'm struggling to keep it together folks.

I think our only hope is that Lidl start making it in Estonia or something and then ship it in.

They'd never try this with Dubliner Irish Cheese I bet. Or Clonakilty pudding. Or Tipperary water. Yeah. Kick Cavan why don't yis, we're a soft target.