8031/20972
I've been in toothpaste Hell for a good few weeks now. I took a gamble on my own life expectancy and bought 6 tubes of Colgate toothpaste. In the unnecessarily expensive and inefficient pump format. They clog up probably worse than regular tubes, but still, like most of you, I have bought into them because of some vague feeling that you won't waste the last bit of toothpaste in the tube. And that little bit is worth paying two and a half times the cost of a whole regular tube for.
Anyway, the first pump tube did not go well for me. On the second day of using it I knocked it off the sink and the plastic around the top cracked. It was now very difficult, but technically possible, to use the red button if you held it in a certain way. Other people who earn as much money as I do might have been tempted to throw the tube away and use one of the others. But I am not other people. It's not that I am tight with money - if anything I am very happy to spend it and not just on myself. If you earn money and don't spend it then you have effectively worked for nothing. Or for someone else. Rich people seem determined to protect their money from other people and yet then they die and the unspent money all goes to someone else. It might be their own kids most of the time, but not always and who knows what they'll do with it. Spend your fucking money you monsters.
It's true though, that I don't like to waste anything. I don't know if that's because I care about the future of the planet or because I once had nothing or because my parents drummed into me the importance of using everything to its full extent. But there was no way I was throwing away a whole tube of expensive toothpaste. I would smash the tube and brush my teeth with paste filled with plastic shards if I needed to. Luckily I just had to awkwardly press the button at a certain angle.
I don't know how many weeks that tube lasted - I am not that great at remembering to brush my teeth - again, just trying to save the planet, but mainly I just forget. But it was several weeks of struggle and when I finally conquered that tube and emptied I felt victorious. I'd done it. I'd not wasted a drop, but my nightmare of mild inconvenience was over.
I got out my second tube of toothpaste, snapped off the little red tag, pumped it a few times to get the blue stuff flowing and I was off.
On the second day of using that toothpaste my son knocked it off the sink and it broke in exactly the same way as the first.
I'm not saying it is a design flaw, but maybe they need to take into account the fact that toothpaste tubes will get dropped and they should make them a little stronger. Of course now I've said that I realise Colgate will make even more money by giving us unbreakable pump tubes that cost. hundreds of pounds more cos they're made of titanium.
I have struggled on with this second tube for weeks (at least two months because the breakage happened in the old house and I STILL didn't throw it away when we moved), but this morning, I finished it. I got out the third of my six tubes (and it's starting to look like the gamble of slightly cheaper bulk purchase is working out, but let's not get cocky), snapped off the little red tab, pumped it a few times to get the blue stuff flowing. How sweet to have a functioning tube for only the second day of probably the last five or six months.
And no, I didn't immediately break it, so your prediction didn't come true.
To be fair though, the other two broke on the second day. So wait til tomorrow's blog. It's going to be a corker.
And congrats to me for keeping on typing pump tubes and not making any kind of double entendre.
The fantastic RHLSTP with the wondrous human that is Michael Sheen is now up wherever you get your pods. It's really good.
Please listen. 
