‘Sometimes, I feel like crying tears of happiness, tears of joy, to see the distance we’ve come and the progress we’ve made,’ said Civil Rights activist John Lewis after a particularly good day at the office.
Not round here, Mr. Lewis. Sometimes I just want to weep when I see how little progress I personally have made in the 22,115 days that I have been crashing through the earthly undergrowth into which I was first deposited.
Take, for example, the fine skill of dealing with outliers, those little bumps in the road that the smooth running of the day can occasionally become. I had one today, when I went into the greengrocer in my local town to buy some cherries.
Now these weren’t any cherries, mind you. The word ‘plump’ might have been designed for them had landladies in saucy seaside postcards not got there first. They glistened suggestively through the window to all passers-by, and I could no more resist them than Vladimir Putin can resist a slice of eastern Ukraine, when he is in the mood. In fact, my thought was not so much ‘do I really need them?’ as ‘can I get into the shop fast enough to stop anyone else buying them. All of them?’
And, slipping on my gingham mask I walked as nonchalantly as I could, and plucked the largest of the three available brown paper bags types available. I filled it with as many cherries as I could consistent with a) being able to carry them back to the car without the bag bursting, and b) not looking stupidly greedy.
‘Did you look at the price, Sir?’ asked the nice lady at the counter when she weighed them, much as a vet might ask whether one had considered putting little Rover to sleep, rather than though a further series of expensive operations.
‘Oh, price?’ I managed to say, as casually as I could, and as if price was something one never really came across outside Sainsburys. ‘No. I didn’t. Are they expensive?’
‘They are late season English,’ she said, as if that explained what was to come. ‘And they are £13.00 a kilo.’ She said it with what P.G Wodehouse might have described as a ‘marked manner’. It had an air of ‘we don’t generally see small timers here’ about it.
I looked at the bag on the scales, in the way that a man might if he has never met an expensive bit of fruit, and never thought he would. Fruit and veg was supposed to be the cheap bit of shopping. Frantically, I tried to estimate the weight of the bag.
‘It’s just over 2 kilos’, she said, cruelly. ‘That’s £26.26’. Even the symmetry of the amount was appalling. Even the fact that I looked so obviously to be someone who shouldn’t be in the shop, let alone fingering its cherries.
Silently screaming, I went through the various options I had, which included a) telling her politely that, now she came to mention price, I had actually seen better quality down the road in Tesco, b) putting some back and paying for a more modest haul and c) trying to look as if £26.26 was the very least I was prepared to pay for cherries, and look disappointed that it wasn’t more.
At this point, a local woman who had once scraped my car with the front of hers, came in, and was standing behind me, waiting with venomous interest to see how my pickle might be sweetened. She was looking at the empty box on the shelf, and so had skin in the game.
‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ I said. ‘I’m sure that they’re delicious.’
‘They are Stella cherries from Garsons Farm,’ she said, as if it justified everything for anyone who wasn’t socially on Square One. As if every one of them had been to a Russell Group university, and had been hand-selected by fragrant hedge fund managers.
So I bought them, and so they sit in front of me. 152 cherries (yup, I counted them after I had washed them) costing £0.172 pence each. Plush with Vitamin A and C, not to mention magnesium and calcium deposits, I can’t bring myself to eat a single one.
Help yourself, Vladimir.
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