Cash for Cherries, Food for Thought
By Simon Barget
- 689 reads
The inconvenience of having to write an original and unique piece of fiction every time I go to the supermarket is an inconvenience I find too hard to bear. It is political correctness gone bad. (It has absolutely nothing to do with political correctness.) It is onerousness beyond the bounds of reason. The fact that the supermarket no longer accepts cash or credit -- or any other normal form of monetary exchange -- for dried and wet goods, for ham and cheeses, for desserts and cauliflower, the fact that you have to put pen to paper in order to come by your trusted groceries is the biggest and most painful obligation that I have ever had to endure in my so far uneventful life. There is no rhyme or reason to it. Why all of a sudden unallowable to use money? The exertion required to come by money pales into insignificance in the face of the exertion required to write something and not only anything, something reasonably good, although the check-out girls will certainly give you the benefit of the doubt, they won’t quibble if your output is rough, a little wanting in quality. But you still have to produce. Personally I used to love fruit and specifically cherries. Cherries in winter in any and every season. I don’t really know what it is that I like about them so much. Everyone seems to like cherries. We all wanted cherries so much they made you write to come by them. There weren’t enough to go round but there was oodles of money. I don’t know why they couldn’t increase the supply. Bring them in from some far-off tropical country, get them shipped in those ice-cold containers and unload them to your hearts content when they get back to England. But such was the demand there was a shortage, and they didn’t want to ration them, which would have been my way of doing it, so they came up with a means of exchange requiring more effort from the buyer. Then came the signs: ‘Food for fiction, acceptable quality, word limit 2,500’ What fool was going to write 2,500 words when there was no lower word limit? And then they extended the regime to melons and peaches, to apples and pears -- no one gives a fig about pears -- to all veg and fish and herbal teas and chocolate and baking goods and even flour so that now you have to write full-stop to be able to put anything past your lips. I could not bear to look at the customer faces when they got to the check out; it takes years to divest yourself of old habits. The scanners scan for characters and import them; they’ll give you a result within about an hour. You can stand there like a lemon or go home and come back, that’s up to you. All the other writing stays in the system but gets you no credit. Now we all have to write, we’re all a bit thinner, and the shelves are more plentifully stocked and the employees look supercilious and think that they’re somehow literate and literary — they are the ones who get to judge the writing — and theft has obviously gone up but if you write something very special or slightly special depending on the severity of your critical judgment, then they will sandblast the food and coat in it gold leaf, what good it does I have no idea. I have sometimes, but not often, held this gold food in my hand looking sheepish, it is conspicuous and people give you weird searching looks. Most people write poems of course; how they’re allowed to get away with it is beyond me. A poem is about as much effort as picking your nose. Though it breathes new meaning into the expression: ‘Food for thought.’
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Comments
O I Larfed
"A poem is about as much effort as picking your nose. Though it breathes new meaning into the expression: ‘Food for thought.’ "
Saha!
"Whistles for hoard of grubby, lyrical upcoming urchins with potential of unpaid placement in an industrial landscape and free-form-poesy, to harvest their main product and flick it at you."
Nibble at your peril
Very silly
Best Lx
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Great title. And the story
Great title. And the story was clever and quirky. Liked the gold leaf. And the little touches like standing around 'like a lemon' really made this work.
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Ha ha ha ha *laughs a little
Ha ha ha ha *laughs a little too hard for sincerity whilst squeezing lemons violently*.
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