Class in a glass

THIS WEEK: ScotRail first class, Funkin’ Irn-Bru Vodka Martini, Lidl frozen Green Smoothie mix

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THING: ScotRail First class

People like to slag off ScotRail, but it’s not that bad. Well, apart from the robot lady announcer who says ‘We’ll soon arrive at…[insert name of bleak, failed Brutalist new town experiment here]’

Every time I hear her/it say ‘we’ll soon arrive’ - a phrase that’s been deliberately chosen to sound like a wee Scottish granny putting on a tartan kettle - my fist soon arrives in my mouth to stop the screams. But you know, it could be worse. At least it’s not one of the crap train companies in England, who are usually run by an upbeat millionaire called Tim and leave you stranded at Preston forever.

I don’t even mind the fact that at this time of year, the Glasgow to Edinburgh train is choc-a-bloc with festival-going handjobs who act like they’ve never been in public before.

However, you do need to have some sort of strategy in place, especially if you happen to be travelling to the festival on the same day that Oasis is playing at Murrayfield Stadium. And as neither me nor my friend were licensed to carry a firearm, instead we decided to travel FIRST CLASS.

Ah, it’s the dream, isn’t it? Superior comfort, far away from le riff raff. What a joy to smoothly sail through the verdant landscape, as staff who look like they’re from a Wes Anderson movie attend to your every need. Top up my champagne, young man! Carry my Louis Vuitton trunk! Three course meal with wine? Don’t mind if I do!

So we boarded the train, expectations high, only to be met with this.

The Orient Express

Yes, ScotRail first class is essentially a grey seat that costs £23.

The beauty of it is that you can’t actually book your grey seat, so you don’t know whether you’ll even get one. Also, there are about three grey seats in the whole carriage, along with an obsolete newspaper rack and some matching grey window blinds that look like they came from a 1980s branch of Nat West.

As luck wouldn’t have it, we managed to get grey seats really far away from each other, so we spent the entire journey texting across the carriage while I read Closer magazine over a woman’s shoulder. The woman lingered for rather a long time on an article entitled ‘I Cheered As I Watched My Fiancé Have Sex With Another Woman on TV’ while her husband looked mutely out of the window. Annoyingly though, she flipped right past ‘A Botched Op In Turkey Left Me With A Hole In My Armpit’ leaving me with nothing to do but stare at grey plastic for 45 minutes.

So, I closed my eyes, breathed in the rarified atmosphere of first class as Poirot (a woman with a massive suitcase and a Lidl bag with sausages in it) moved stealthily down the aisle, and no delicious hors d’oeuvres were served by a steward in a little red hat.

It was okay though, because we soon arrived.

VERDICT: Absolute VIP-off

THING: Funkin’ Irn-Bru Vodka Martini cocktail

How about this for classy? A vodka martini in a tin made from Irn-Bru and er, delicious nitrogen.

Weirdly, this tastes more like Irn-Bru than Irn-Bru. If you don’t know what Irn-Bru tastes like, people usually say it’s like bubblegum, but I think it’s more of a FEELING. To me, Irn-Bru tastes like going to a cafe when you’re a kid, just after you’ve been swimming. It’s untranslatable, like saudade, or mittelschmertz, or the Japanese word for ‘the light that shines between the plum trees in Osaka prefecture from September 1st to September 23rd.’

As for the nitrogen, that’s apparently supposed to give it a ‘velvety texture and a smooth head’ but do we want velvety smooth-headed Irn-Bru? I would argue we don’t, because my teeth felt fuzzy and coated after one sip, as if I’d been eating muppets.

Still, it turns out that this is the perfect hand-held aperitif to help you navigate the mayhem of the Edinburgh Fringe, as you watch a woman in a hat made out of knives and forks perform an experimental musical about her narcissistic mother - then go home in a very expensive grey seat.

VERDICT: ‘A tour de force’ The Scotsman

THING: Lidi frozen Green Smoothie Mix

After all that excitement, I needed something healthy. However, my stress levels after trying to mop up the carnage this created probably did more harm than good.

Yes, I know I really need to stop being seduced by green drinks. But we live in a world where spinach ice cubes are seen as a good lifestyle choice and smoothies are an actual breakfast. You’re meant to put these in your Ninja 42-in-1 bullet blender ice cream fryer with some apple juice and chug it down, before ‘crushing it’ at work (doing a spreadsheet and going to the toilet).

In theory, that - combined with your daily magnesium/creatine/collagen/Epsom salt shot - will optimise your productivity, protect your microbiome and help you live longer, so you can continue working until you’re 107. Hurray!

Life, though, as we all know, doesn’t work like that. And if you happen to have an ancient James Martin blender with blunt blades and a motor that sounds like a farting wasp, things start going wrong very quickly.

Anyway, long story short, this is what came out of the blender - and all over the place. Nobody can drink it, James Martin is persona non grata, there’s spinach in the cutlery drawer and I’m feeling like the AI version of Popeye. (Poopeye the Salor Man). Absolute shocker.

VERDICT: Pesto La Vista, baby