CORE BLIMEY! THE MIXED RESULTS FROM OUR THREE GUINEA PIGS
CLAUDIA CONNELL
SOME people pummel a cushion to vent their anger, others kick inanimate objects. Me? I abuse apples.
When I first heard about this, I thought it sounded absolutely bonkers. But being unpleasant as part of a legitimate experiment? I’m not going to pass on that opportunity.
I’ m not short of uncharitable thoughts: insult strip off my tongue much more readily than compliments.
During the first three days of my Big Apple Experiment, there didn’t appear to be much difference between the two halves, with both going ever so slightly brown around the edges.
Several times a day I would sing romantic songs to the ‘love’ apple. Billy Joel’s Just The Way You Are was a particular favourite.
I cradled the jar close to my chest as I imagined all the things I would buy with a lottery win and then reminisced about my best ever holiday, to the Whitsunday Islands near Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, where I sunbathed on white sands and paddled in the turquoise ocean.
Then I turned to the hate apple and recalled my worst holiday ever. A week in Lloret de Mar on a €150 holiday where the hotel staff stole my clothes and the karaoke went on until 4am.
But it wasn’t enough — both apples stayed much the same. I had to raise my game. So, while I still said nice things to the love apple — how cute it was, how delicious it looked and showered the j ar with kisses — I hissed at its other half every time I walked past. I shouted at it and said it was to blame when I got a parking ticket, and I started putting it on a ‘naughty apple’ step.
After a week, the hate apple was far browner than the love apple. All the bile I usually reserve for cold callers and hawkers was harnessed and directed at it.
Amazingly, after 14 days, it started to grow mould, while the love apple just looked a little off colour. Maybe it was a fluke, maybe my levels of toxicity are off the scale.
But as much as I relished abusing the hate apple, the result did give me food for thought.
If my anger could cause so much decay to a piece of fruit in just a few days, what was it doing to me? Is my
negativity the cause of my constant headaches? My indigestion and backache? Worse still, is it making me age prematurely?
A sweeter nature may, indeed, improve my well-being but, alas, I fear it’s far too late for me to transform from the Wicked Queen into Snow White.
BEL MOONEY
THE idea of mind over matter is always appealing, because, after all, most of us like to believe that perhaps we can alter our fates.
As an advice columnist, I certainly believe that is true. So practising on two halves of an apple seemed to me to be a good way of limbering up those mental muscles.
But it did make me feel faintly foolish — to go into my study each morning to have a conversation with a piece of fruit.
Perhaps that f eeling was my undoing — removing me from the process of real belief, because as soon as you start feeling daft you take a step back. Nevertheless, I went on with the experiment.
I told the half-apple in the jar marked ‘love’ all about my family and how much I adore them, because I can’t imagine a subject more likely to warm the air in the room. I told it how blessed I feel.
Then I turned to the ‘hate’ apple (about three metres away) and focused my mind on a certain married couple who did something I still find it hard to forgive. I also channelled more potent dislike by thinking about anarchists and the hard Left and Islamic fanatics. Easy to beam true loathing that way.
But nothing happened — even after the recommended two weeks. Neither had rotted or turned the least bit brown. Perhaps the atmosphere in my lovely study might be so full of peace and love that my fortunate apple had attained a sort of fruity nirvana!
SAM TAYLOR
LIKE most of my generation, I am the product of the kind of benevolent neglect practised by 1960s middle- class parents. As the saying goes, it made me who I am today.
It taught me resilience and the need to keep emotions in check. It also taught me that there was little likelihood of being ‘mollycoddled’ so I might as well ‘get on with it’.
I suppose i t was i nevitable, therefore, that I was going to be illequipped to relate emotionally to half an apple.
I’ve always thought of myself as a loving person and have a woolly belief in the power of positive thought — although it never worked with my maths O-level paper and certainly doesn’t come close to reducing the size of my thighs.
Still, what could go wrong? Given the miserable state of my ‘love’ apple at the end of this experiment, the answer is everything. Where did I fail? I have been wailing to myself ever since.
I spoke to it nicely. I tried to compliment it, although it’s hard to flatter a dismembered lump of fruit. True, I didn’t blow it kisses constantly or rock it in my arms, but I sang it a couple of Beatles songs. Yet still it turned into a greying, pulping mess.
The ‘hate’ apple, on the other hand, seems to have thrived under my old-school parenting model. That’s despite it taking the full brunt of an hour-long rant about the plumber, a full- on frown with no make-up every morning and a couple of shakes — I know, don’t report me.
Stepping back from it though, I have to ask question; what has this crazy experiment taught me? That I am not a loving person but a heartless dictator (possibly). Or just a mad middle-aged woman who thinks that the world can be altered by talking to an apple every day instead of just eating one?
It’s the latter, I fear. One thing is for sure, my mother would have just thrown both bits in the bin.