So what's left in your fruit bowl? Ours has the hopes and aspirations of Xmas past. The bowl was given to A when she worked at the coal face of the NHS. A family were so pleased with one of the GPs that they gave him a family heirloom. The fruit bowl. Said GP did not like same. So the bowl was passed on to A, peacemaker and disposer of bodies!
It sits in pride of place on kitchen table. At the moment it has, post Xmas, 4 bananas, two apples, a papaya and two avocados. A's Mum, a very sweet lady at 90 up but with some short term memory problems, kept asking what the avocados were. Various explanations and gentle promptings produced the same round of questions as to what on earth these things were. Good gracious!
Brendan Barber of the TUC has just been complaining about the enormous buckets of boodle that the captains of industry pay themselves. Nice one Brendan!
However, what about the the grubby little deals that go on all the time, Xmas boxes to the milk persons and newspaper delivery operatives; money paid over in cash to window cleaners. A nod and a wink, a heartfelt thanks, and a handful of cash to the person who sorts out car, central heating, roof, or drains in extremis. I'm sure A, the bounder, never entered the fruit bowl in the register of employees interests or gifts. Only joking! Humbuggery! Great fun, remember you heard it here first.
I can remember one of the few times I successfully pulled the leg of our DoH (he was a saint) when I worked in a London borough as his assistant. We had both taken time out after 6pm to visit the opening of some sheltered housing we had paid for. The developer had provided some cakes and biscuits and fizzy white wine. I drove the DoH so he decided to have a glass. I looked at the bottle and decided that a glass was probably worth 4GBPs; well over the casual hospitality limit in local government terms at the time! I kept a straight face and said that I expected to see it entered in the hospitality book the next day. I never bothered to look.
The other time I brought a belated smile to his lips, poor sod, was when we passed a poster announcing a meeting to be addressed by Tony Cliff. I pointed it out to DoH who had a whistfull look in his eye, being a bit of a firebrand in his yoof. As he perked up I couldn't resist the - I've got all his records line.
Anyway, the domestic godless tip for Avocados. Use horseradish sauce instead of mustard!
