There is one Japanese vending machine within riding distance of my flat that sells Dr Pepper, and that fucking machine was, until last week, the single load-bearing pillar of my entire emotional infrastructure in this country. One row. One glorious, embattled, perpetually-sold-out row of the good stuff, wedged in among the eternal Coke like a war refugee.

Let me explain the topology, because the topology is the whole crime. This machine has, at any given moment, three full rows of Coca-Cola. Three. Coke that is everywhere. Coke you can buy from any of the four hundred thousand identical machines that infest this archipelago like beige fungus. You cannot walk past a rice paddy in this country without a vending machine humming at you, and every last one of the bastards sells Coke. Demand for Coke at this specific location is, generously, nil. And yet there it sat. Three rows. Permanently, smugly, fully stocked.

And next to it, one row of Dr Pepper. Which sold out by lunchtime every single bloody day, because every Dr Pepper sicko within a 700-mile radius had triangulated this machine like it was the last well in the desert. We were a community. We were a congregation. We would arrive, see the empty slot, and nod at each other with the grim solidarity of people who know.

The day the angelic light went out

Last Tuesday it was 35 degrees and the air had the consistency of warm soup. The craving hit me like a brick. I got on the bike. I pedalled through the kind of humidity that makes your shirt a permanent fixture, dreaming the whole way of that purple can and its faintly medicinal, gloriously wrong flavour. I round the corner. I look up at the spot where the Dr Pepper used to sit and radiate its small beam of angelic light.

And there, where my Dr Pepper had lived, was a fourth row of fucking Coke.

A FOURTH ROW. For fuck's sake. Some absolute clown in a logistics office, some spreadsheet-brained tosser who has never once in his life felt joy, looked at a machine selling out of one product daily and fully stocked on another, and concluded: more of the thing nobody's buying. Genius. Truly the work of a sovereign nation's finest minds. Let's solve the runaway success of the Dr Pepper by deleting it and installing a fourth identical column of the drink that already accounts for three-quarters of the bloody unit.

This is the bit that does my head in. This is not stupidity. Stupidity I could forgive. This is system. This is the same instinct that gives you a ten-page laminated pamphlet to renew a card. The optimisation toward sameness. The deep cultural horror of the thing that sticks out, the can that isn't like the other cans, the kuuki wo yomu applied to soft drinks until the one interesting option reads the room and quietly removes itself. The Dr Pepper was the nail that stood up. So they hammered it flat and replaced it with Coke, and somewhere a supply manager felt the warm glow of restored harmony.

A grief with no counter to complain at

The truly maddening part is that there is no one to scream at. There's no desk. There's no form. There is just a machine, humming politely, offering me four rows of a thing I do not want and a hot black coffee in a can for when I want to feel like a salaryman dying inside on the last train. I stood there in the soup-heat like a mug, staring at a vending machine, mourning. Thirty-five years old. Genuinely close to tears over a discontinued fizzy drink, which is, of course, perfectly normal behaviour in 2026.

I bought a Coke. What else was I going to do, you absolute muppets. I bought the Coke and I drank it warm because I'd been standing there grieving long enough for it to go off the boil, and it tasted of nothing, and of compromise, and of the slow death of every distinctive thing in this country that some committee eventually files down into beige.

The slot's still empty in my head. Four rows of Coke and a hole shaped like the only joy I had left.