#bedtime for sugar crazed monsters

[redscharlach]

The most relatable bedtime

Meanwhile…

[guiltypleasurefandomface]

A Quick Guide to British Drinks

Tea - boil the kettle, pour it in the cup with the tea bag, add the milk, add the sugar, stir. Or some people put the milk in before the hot water.

Coffee - spoonful of instant coffee, hot water from the kettle, add the milk and sugar to taste. Coffee machines, grinders, caffetieres, and pod machines are popular and probably half the norm now but for decades, coffee in the UK was mostly just instant from a jar. Which we had no problem with, leave your instant coffee snobbery at the door, please and thank you. Nescafe is the leading brand, it’s expensive as hell. The next one would probably be Maxwell House. If you go any cheaper, you’re looking at shop’s own and that’s where your snobbery can come back because that’s just coffee scented dust.

Hot chocolate - 3 heaped spoonfuls, hot water from the kettle, then depending on brand add milk and sugar to taste. The leading brands are cadbury’s and options, the really posh stuff would be Green and Black’s Cocoa. We now have varieties such as Malters, Galaxy, Mars Bars, Magic Stars (which is Rubbish! The packaging made it look like the chocolates floated on the top and they don’t! They just melt and form a melted lumps at the bottom of the cup!) but again, shop’s own versions are available.

Lesser popular hot drinks are ovaltine and Bovril. Ovaltine is a malt drink, people tend to drink it before bed, it’s got a reputation of being an old person’s drink and maybe what grandparents will give their grandkids before bedtime. I can’t stand the stuff. Bovril is a yeast extract drink. It’s got a reputation for being associated with Birmingham, but it’s popular in a lot of areas across England, and it’s also associated with football fans.

Even lesser popular drinks, is hot beef oxo. The poor man’s Bovril. Oxo is a stock cube mostly used to make gravy with, also used in casseroles and cottage pies (beef flavouring only). I don’t know if it’s popular in one area over others, it just tends to be a replacement for Bovril, or because the flavour isn’t as strong as Bovril, as a preferred choice over bovril.

Cold drinks:-

Almost all drinks with -ade in the name are fizzy drinks. Powerade, which is a brand of energy drinks, not a flavour, are not. But lemonade, limeade, strawberryade, cherryade, orangeade and raspberryade ald other flavours named like that all are. We do not use the word soda besides when talking about Cream Soda, a specific type of fizzy drink. Regional and age demographics with determine on if it's called pop or not. In some areas pop just means lemonade, in others it means all fizzy drinks. It can be one of those family idiosyncrasies.

Rootbeer is a modern American import, most people aren't likely to drink it, we also don't have Yahoo. Almost every popular type of branded drink we have here has a shop's own version, except Tizer, Irn Bru, Lucozade. You can have a good fun time making up discounted versions of drinks. In real life we had Panda Pop Cola, Rola Cola, and Happy Cola.

Ribena is a leading brand of squash, that's a bottle of concentrated fruit syrup that you dilute down with water. It comes in blackcurrant, orange and summer fruits. There's a non-concentrated ribena strawberry version, originally available in just a little carton that you drink with a straw, but now available in bottles. Vimto is Ribena's main competitor, it’s basically the same stuff.

Depending on social class, Ribena will either be called juice, squash or cordial. Cordial is actually something slightly different. It's the same principle, a fruity syrup you dilute down but it can also be mixed with alcohol. Cordials come on fancier flavours, like elderflower, barley and fruits of the forest and is mainly aimed at a more adult market. Squash is juice, cartons of fruit juice from concentrate is juice, freshly squeezed juice from fruit is juice, bottled freshly squeezed fruit juice is called juice. Ribena has a separate cordial range but they're fairly new to the cordial market. This is a sweeping generalisation, but actual cordial is middle class. Calling squash “cordial” is “Poshing it up”.

Going back to the ribena strawberry in a carton. We do not call them juice boxes, they are “small carton drinks” and only snotty people would comment on someone drinking from a carton with a straw. I’ve seen some wierd reactions to people over the age of 12 drinking from a small carton with a straw on american television shows and it baffled me, because that’s not the general attitude here. In fact, this is a general lesson everyone should just learn actually: Don't be rude about other people's drink choices. You have no idea why someone might be drinking from small cartons with a straw. In fact, for a while CapriSun were popular with everyone, not just kids.

On the other hand, Ribena Fruit Shoot, which are small bottlles with sports lids, are marketed at kids and young teens, and you don’t find many adults drinking them, but because they’re self contained and easy to hold, I saw them quite regularly being used in disabled circles, for both kdis and adults.

Other popular soft drinks we have, besides the obvious coke and Pepsi and ones mentioned above are: Lilt, 7up, Fanta, Rubicon, Dandelion and Burdock, innocent smoothies and innocent juices. And yes, orange juice from actual oranges will come in either "Orange Juice" or "Orange Juice with Bits".

Lucozade for years was touted as a sort of cure all. Have a cold, the flu, upset tummy, or headache? You'd drink Lucozade to help the actual medicine along a bit. In the 90s it changed tactics to be more of a sports drink but I'd say it's only in the last 10 years it was able to shake off the idea that it was good for you if you were sick. It then fell out of favour a few years ago when it changed its recipe to reduce sugars, and now a lot of people don't like it.

There was a whole craze between 2005 and 2011 of drinking RedBull energy drinks and there were so many channel 5 health documentaries that talked about how bad it was for you.

Energy Drinks are still quite popular and are also something you can have a wild time coming up with names for. Popular brands here are Monster, Relentless, Rockstar, Grenade and, er... Well, I don’t want to say the name of the other popular one. The people behind the product swear they don’t mean it in a sexually vulgar way but at the same time, their advert got banned for being sexually explicit, and there’s no cats involved in either the marketing OR the making of  process. Just think of the name of the James Bond character played by Honour Blackman and you can figure it out from there.

And then there's water. Generally speaking, all water in England has been safe to drink out of taps for decades. It would be highly unusual to have unsafe drinking water from a tap. However, it does happen and it’s a nightmare to sort out because you get passed from pillar to post as every department possibly involved blames all the other departments. So it does happen. But generally speaking, no big deal if your England-based character just drinks water from their tap.

And on a slightly related note, most water from the Midlands to the south is hard water - it produces lime scale - most water in the North is soft - it doesn't produce lime scale.

If your character is from the north and goes to university in the south, they might get a nasty shock one day after using their kettle for a couple of months if they didn't already know what lime scale in a kettle looked like.Especially when they’re tipping a kettle to pour the water, and lime scale comes out along with it, ruining the perfect cup of tea.