The Press and Journal (Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire)
SUCH TOM FOOLERY
Icelebrated July’s arrival by eating a tomato. Well, I think it was a tomato. On the principle that if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it’s a duck, this item certainly looked like a tomato. It was bought in a supermarket, in a pack of four, all of which were richly red, uniformly shaped and the ideal size for a hungry man’s sandwich.
I’m not going to enter into a lengthy discourse as to whether a tomato is a fruit or vegetable – it’s a fruit, I reckon – but it’s probably the only piece of fruit I’d put in a bread sandwich.
A raspberry sandwich wouldn’t do it for me, nor an orange one, a pineapple one or one dripping with mango and pawpaw. Some folk like banana sandwiches, but not me. Bananas are the Devil’s handiwork, as anyone who has left a banana skin in their lunch box and forgotten about it will readily understand.
No matter, back to the tomato. Alarm bells were sounding when I opened the pack and inhaled the aroma of, well, nothing. In the Fyne Place greenhouse, where my own tomato plants are maturing nicely, there’s a wonderful heady smell of fresh fruit, or vegetables, depending on your view. It reminds me of when dedicated fruit and veg shops were part of every high street.
As you wandered round, the fresh smells progressively changed from the green of cauliflowers and cabbages to the earthy potatoes and then to the exotic Jaffa oranges or newly-picked apples.
No such luck with my supermarket tom. Even more alarmingly, when I tried it I discovered it tasted of, well, nothing again. It certainly didn’t taste of tomato.
Had I tried it blindfolded, I wouldn’t have known whether it was a fresh tomato or a leftover piece of packaging from an Amazon delivery. In truth, my money would have been on the cardboard.
It set me wondering how on Earth we as a nation can ever expect youngsters to increase their consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables if supermarkets employ teams of ingenious flavour removers to extract all the taste and smell out of so-called fresh produce before they sell it.
I know that one of the symptoms of Covid is that you might lose your sense of taste and smell, but I didn’t realise that you could lose all your sense of judgment, too.
It seems that the former health secretary, Matt Hancock, had been working much too close to Covid issues for far too long, and also much too close to his aide, Gina Coladangelo. He must have infected her in some way as she seemed to have lost all sense of taste by taking up with the West Suffolk MP.
No disrespect, Gina, but he’s nae George Clooney, or Brad Pitt, or even Wullie the tractorman.
You won’t know Wullie, but he works on a Speyside farm and is a fine, bonnie lad.
They’re now apparently in isolation away from the public eye and their families.
It’s Hancock’s wife, or probably soon to be ex-wife, Martha, I feel sorry for. What a horrible way to discover your husband has been dealing with affairs of state while stating to everyone else that affairs were off-limits. Like my tomato, that caused me some extreme exasperation.
Not so the Queen’s visit to the Irn-Bru factory at Cumbernauld, though, in the company of Prince William. Unlike the high-powered hypocrite of a deposed health secretary, the Queen is propriety in perfection. She understands the value of doing the right thing in public service. No government politician is fit to carry her handbag.
It was fun that after sampling Irn-Bru on their factory visit, Prince William remarked that “you could taste the girders in it”. It’s good that something had some taste about it this week, as the unsavoury pictures of political figures working on their briefs, or each other’s briefs, then my boringly bland supermarket tomato, were decidedly distasteful.
If it were the 19th Century I could save my tomatoes then hurl them at rotten politicians. We’ve progressed since then, thankfully, but not apparently in all matters concerning taste.