100 YEARS OLD AND STILL PIQUED BY PIMENTOS...

SEEKING to replenish my stocks of pitted green olives, I popped into one of Lord Sainsbury’s local emporiums for a jarful. I say a jarful because that’s what I was looking for: a jar full of pitted green olives. I know they also sell olives in plastic packets but I prefer the glass jars. They seem to contain more olives and the screw tops help the olives last longer.

So I headed for the cooking ingredients aisle and quickly found the olive section only to be dismayed by what was on offer. They had queen olives, which were bigger than I wanted; they had pitted black olives of the right size in jars; they had pitted green olives stuffed with pimento but I could not see what I was looking for.

I peered around and behind the pimento-stuffed olives to see if my prey was lurking there but there was no sign of any, nor a label suggesting that they had sold out. I sought out an employee of the so-called supermarket to ask why the choice of olives on offer was distinctly less than super.

“Madam,” I said, “can you explain why this emporium has pimentostuffed pitted green olives but no such olives unstuffed? Surely, anyone who really wants their olives stuffed with pimentos can chop up a pimento and stuff the pieces into the olives.”

To pre-empt her possible reply, I then added: “Now you might say that I could purchase the stuffed olives and poke out the pimentos but quite apart from leaving an unsightly and unwanted pile of pimento pieces, I feel it would be disrespectful to the person you have employed to stuff the olives.

“How do you think such a person would feel if he or she knew that their work, in which I feel sure they take a certain amount of pride, was being undone by a customer who does not want pimentos in his olives?”

She looked a little nonplussed and started peering at the merchandise, so I went on: “I use the olives, you see, mainly in the making of Greek salads and pizzas. I find that the latter can be considerably enhanced by the addition of pitted green olives and anchovies.

“In the unlikely event that I want the taste of pimentos as well, I can cut up a pimento and sprinkle it on top but I do not want the pimentos forced upon me by being stuffed inside my olives. And I don’t think they go very well in a Greek salad either.”

The assistant and I were then both distracted by an announcement: “This is a message for the back door team,” it began: “Would the back door team please go to the back door where a delivery is awaiting collection.”

What, I wondered, were the back door team doing if they weren’t at the back door? Could it be, I asked myself, that they had wandered off to some other location where they were busily stuffing green olives with pimento?

I was ready to suggest to the assistant that they keep their back door team at the back door where they would be ready to cope with deliveries and less likely to be distracted by pimentos and need summoning by an announcement over the public address, but I then noticed that she had fled. Another time, perhaps.