I swear that I don’t think I’m better than you, just because I drink Sanpellegrino Limonata instead of Lift or Mello Yello. It’s not even my fault. I have a studio at the Abbotsford Convent, alongside painters, writers, poets and even a recorder maker, and as most of you would know, there is a direct correlation between the quality of work an artist produces, and the worldliness of his or her soft drink can.
When I buy my can from Cam Miller at St Helier’s Street General Store and Gallery, our exchange has now been ritualised:

TW: The usual Sanpellegrino Limonata, please.
Cam: No probs.
TW: How are they going in the war against can top contagion, Cam?
Cam: No cases that I’ve heard of since yesterday, Tone.

Sanpellegrino, on visual evidence, is at the forefront of the fight against can top contagion (CTC). Every drink has an incredibly groovy, industrially designed foil cover, stretching over a pull tab that on lesser can artefacts is just left exposed to the filthy, contaminated, disease-infested universe.
I didn’t expect any changes in the ritual. As contaminated and disease-infested as the world is, I wasn’t totally convinced about CTC. I thought it might have been invented at Sanpellegrino board level. I detected the whiff of lawyers, doing preventative work at the expense of Italy’s shrinking tin foil reserve. I detected marketers, the sort of people who knew that I wanted to share a Coke with Buddy, and that I wanted it written on my can.
And then, against the odds, Cam changed it up:

Cam: You know I was talking about CTC with another customer —she likes the Sanpellegrino Aranciata —and she said that a person died as a result of can top contagion. Apparently, the can was in storage and it was infected with mouse urine. So … anyway …’

I was flooded with goodwill for the legal industry. Of course CTC existed! The world is a vicious, deadly place, and it’s only lawyers that keep us from falling into a mouse pissy abyss. I apologised for ever doubting them. I gave thanks for the trendy cleanliness of my Limonata, understanding at last that it couldn’t be any other way.
While I was at it I thanked them for iTunes ‘Conditions of Use’ pages. I thanked them for removing the good slides at the park. I thanked them for safe-but-not-quite-hot-enough take away coffee. I thanked them for DVD commentary disclaimers, because surely, back in the day, Ted Danson or Woody Allen or Dolf Lundgren or somebody went on a defamatory tirade, and it got waved right through to the commentary track because the distributor couldn’t be arsed listening to what they’d said. There had to have been a suit, surely? I mean, they wouldn’t just waste our lives with needless warnings?

Yes, part of me was happy that CTC existed. It meant that my youthful decision to become a lawyer was holding up, and that my sorry-arsed lack of principle in continuing to consume Sanpellegrino entirely justified.

But I did decide to check out CTC on the internet. The only site discussing it was the ‘Rumour has it’ site, Snopes. The relevant ‘widely distributed emails’ read as follows:

I’m not saying Snopes is never wrong …

Yes I am. Snopes is never wrong.

There you have it. Rat urine can kill you, but the murder weapon is yet to be a soft drink can. It’s leptspirosis neurosis, whipped up by lawyers, capitalised on by a soft drink giant.

I should stop drinking it. Cam should stop stocking it.

But the can is so pretty.

So pretty.