Pineapple juice

When I was a kid, we drank a lot of pineapple juice - the brand that came in the big blue tins. My sisters and I loved to watch my mother open a new tin. To us, it was a ritual as solemn as any tea ceremony. First, Mum would take out a plastic funnel and an old white-handled can opener whose end vaguely resembled a fleur-de-lis. After upending the tin a few times like it was paint, she'd place it - label the right way up - on the kitchen bench. She'd then make a triangular hole at some point around the rim of the shiny silver top, followed by a smaller one directly opposite, so as to ensure an even pour into the funnel. The next part was our favourite: how many plastic bottles (which we'd hold steady) would be needed to store the juice? That obviously depended on the sizes of the empties available, but our goal was to guess the number - to the nearest fraction - before anyone else did. Not a drop would be wasted in the pouring, and that went for the frothy dregs caused by the shaking, too. If you'd overestimated the amount of receptacles necessary, you'd will the liquid to magically keep flowing, but when you saw the froth you knew it was almost done. And now that I think about it, the guessing game wasn't our fave part of the process. No, our real favourite was waiting until the second the big blue tin was empty, then asking for a glass of pineapple juice, please. Even though Mum said, "But it isn't cold," and even though she'd gone to all that trouble to bottle it.