Home > Archive > Canned Oxygen - It's the Real Thing

Canned Oxygen - It's the Real Thing (12.04) One day in 1992 I was watching television, probably one of those shows in which a Radio One celebrity, later to be convicted of paedophilia, travels to a strange country and takes the piss out of it. In this programme, designed to make us feel both afraid of and superior to Johnny Foreigner, our brave explorer finds himself in a bar of the future. Unlike an English pub there are no pint jars of bitter here, just skinny-looking black-clad hipsters lying around on beanbags, staring at mood lights and wearing plastic tubes up their noses. It's more like the Korova Milk Bar than the Dog and Duck. This, my dears, is an oxygen bar and you just know that it'll never catch on. Why would anyone go to an oxygen bar? Surely the air outside is good enough? And you have to pay for it at a bar, a lot of money, how can that be? These three simple questions have plagued me for twelve years, a period that has allowed the fad of recreational oxygen bars to die and then return again. I found part of the answer in Ann Arbor, Michigan, earlier this year. I pestered my boyfriend to take me to the mall where someone had opened an oxygen bar and was giving away two-for-the-price-of-one coupons. I remembered someone, lying on a hospital bed, sick with cancer, snorting down lungfuls of oxygen from a nearby canister. "It's like a cool breeze," he wheezed at me. That sounded good, but I felt too shy to ask if could have a go. Unfortunately, the oxygen bar was quite a stressful experience. I think we were the first customers, no one really knew what they were doing or how to treat us. Simon opted for the "energising" mix, which involved sitting on a stool by a bar, sniffing oxygen that was infused with a faux minty smell. I chose "relaxation." I lay on a fierce electric massage table with a heating element teetering on top of my tummy. The man in charge put headphones on me, explaining that I'd like the music because it was "Like Enya". I can't remember what flavour oxygen I was given, I only know that after twenty minutes of being pummelled by that table, I was nauseous, sore, humiliated and ready to leave. I should have learnt my lesson, I suppose. But the idea of choosing to breathe oxygen for fun or for relaxation still has some indefinable pull on me. It's like a quaint Victorian remedy that also reeks of some future dystopia where even the air we breathe has become a commodity. Doing recreational oxygen is like mucking around with your body with minimal possibility of harm. So the other week my girlfriend and I were driving to South Wales. Because neither of us had parents who indulged us with stops at motorway service stations when we were kids, we make sure that we visit as many of them as possible now that we are adults, and spend our money freely on the plastic-wrapped eccles cakes and boxes of fudge that we find therein. In a service station just outside of Bristol we came upon an entire fridge unit filled with OGO product. The latest thing! OGO is a Dutch company that sells, wait for it, canned oxygen. They have a secondary line of bottled water, oxygenated water that contains up to 35% more oxygen than regular water, in still or carbonated versions. This stuff is not cheap. Even though they're cutting out all the overheads that they'd need to sell oxygen in a bar, a can of peppermint flavoured O will set you back at least £5. The water is £1.50 for about half a pint. Kay and I looked at the chilled display and sneered and wondered. And then we admitted to ourselves that we really wanted some and went halves on a can just to see what it was like. The cashier smirked when I said: "Now I know that I have more money than sense." We read the instructions and chugged that shit down, hoping that it would make us brainier, prettier and generally better. Kay wailed: "It's not working, I don't even know if I'm doing it right" and I answered "It smells a bit minty," and that was it. Duped again. And look, man, the leaflet stuck to the side said that there were at least 15 doses, but how am I going to know when the can is empty?