Andy Richardson: Juicing tales put the squeeze on friendship

"Nothing," I lied, as though I hid crisp box-sized cubes of cardboard beside my desk every day of the week. "Come on," he said, lifting the lid. "Let's have a look."

I'd bought a juicer: an ElectriQ HSL600, to be precise. It has curves like Amber Rose. Its colour was virginal white with swishes of lime-green, like a Go Faster Mini Cooper S.

Dave decided I'd gone mad. "What have you bought that for?" he asked rhetorically, like a teacher asking a 14-year-old whether it was really a good idea to burn ethanol in the presence of potassium manganate and hydrogen peroxide.

"I like juice."

Dave scoffed. He's good at that. He has a sage nod, you know, a sort of old-man's-simultaneous-stare-and-head-droop that says: 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've seen it all before. Damn fool'.

"It's a masticating juicer," I said, trying to justify the money I'd wasted on the Amber Rose curves and Go Faster lime swishes. Dave thought I was swearing.

"A what?"

"A masticating juicer."

Not all juicers are equal and masticating juicers are the crème de la crème. They are to juicing what Paris is to fashion, what Mercedes is to F1, what Cristiano Ronaldo is to scoring goals. Dave was unconvinced.

I persisted. "There are masticating juicers and centrifugal juicers." Dave's eyes glazed over. He looked at me like I was a physics teacher trying to explain the Higgs boson to a six-year-old. I did what all geeks do: offered a patronising, like-for-like example.

"A centrifugal juicer is like a washing machine." Dave had visions of Valencia oranges being put on a fast spin cycle. "They whizz up the fruit really fast, until it squirts out."

"And what's a masticating juicer?"

"It gently crushes the fruit."

"What's the difference?"

"The centrifuge spins it so fast that it gets hot and the goodness disappears. The masticating one is like like a lover's caress. The juice comes out happy." I prayed for the ground to open beneath me and swallow me.

At this point, I lost Dave. I'm not surprised. He had visions of me getting steamy with over-ripe figs in the vegetable aisle of the local supermarket. "Security..."

He reigned himself in: "So you can put your oranges in a washing machine, or squeeze them like it's Valentine's Day."

I nodded as colour rose in my cheeks.

"Isn't it easier to go to Sainsbury's?"

He had a point. It's not the first time I've lost somebody by offering a domestic appliance story. I flat-shared a big house in Putney once with a girl called Melissa. Melissa was mad. She worked as a carer for social services – and if ever there was a case where roles ought to have been reversed, that was it. She had two cats, both of which were riddled with fleas and which drove her seven housemates to distraction. Each morning, we'd wake up covered with itchy, pin-sized marks and curse her name.

One of her cats took great pleasure in breaking into cupboards and stealing our food. The poor thing was underfed and after raiding the cupboards it would curl up inside the washing machine to keep warm. It came to a sorry end. One day, the house was stunned into silence by a blood-curdling scream. It was Melissa. Two of us raced into the kitchen to see what was wrong. One of our housemates had put his jeans in for a hot wash, not realising that the cat was still inside. Fifty nine hot, wet and very dizzy minutes later, the cat had become the cleanest – and deadest – creature in London. I decided not to tell Dave that story. I thought it might put him off his juice.

"I've had an idea," said Dave. He'd moved on to cleverer things.

"What is it?"

"Teeth."

"What?"

"Teeth."

He started to explain. Instead of spending money I don't have on a masticating juicer, gentling crushing apples as though it was February 14 and extracting a thimbleful of juice, I could just eat the goddam fruit using my free-at-the-point-of-birth teeth.

"No pips, no mess, no washing up. What do you say?"

I pleaded with Dave. "But what if I fancy watermelon juice?"

He'd already won the argument.

"Cut a slice of watermelon. Eat it. Simples."

I hate Dave even more than Doctor Who hates daleks. He's not the most intelligent man in the world, but he is arguably the sanest and most logical. When I talk to Dave, I feel like Jade Goody telling Carol Vorderman how to spell; like Ronald McDonald telling Gordon Ramsay how to cook steak; like Peter Andre lecturing Fred Astaire in dance.

"Fancy a drink?" said Dave. "I'm doing a supermarket run."

"Yeah, I'll have a juice."