Onion Letter

27/7/04

Why?????. how wonderful it is to write to you again...

Now, obviously a lot has happened since last we spoke: Michael Moore
has wowed the world; Sadaam has been up in front of the judges and
Brian has left Westlife to spend more time with Kerry MacFattun - but
the one thing that is on everyone's lips at the moment, as I'm sure a
worldly-wise woman like yourself will know, is onions.

The debates are endless, and I will only refer to some of them here
(otherwise I will be up typing all night!)

Onion Debate #1: Just exactly where do they come from?

Now, it has been long thought by vegetable experts and tight fisted
people that grow their own food (what's wrong with the supermarket?),
that onions are planted, develop and grow in the ground. But they're
wrong. It has been discovered recently by scientists in a place
somewhere that onions are actually the second-cousins of persons
descending from ex Soviet Union countries. Not people that still live
there, in places like Latvia and Watfukzistan (that would be
ridiculous), but from people who have ancestry in those places.
What they do, in a bizarre Eastern-European ritual dating back months,
is they collect the onion bulbs when they've been planted by gardeners,
purveyors of onions and those skinflint supermarket-dodgers, take them
to secret 'Onion Cafes' and place them into large, fluorescent
receptacles that vibrate. Once the vibrating process has taken place,
the onions spring (that's a pun, get it?) to life and start a brief
career in Disco Dancing. Once they have won enough regional
competitions, they are rewarded with top Ex-Soviet prizes, such as old
newspapers and contracts to work for Rupert Murdoch, whereupon they
become so dissatisfied with their winnings that they die. Their corpse
is then shifted to a special onion morgue where it is left under a
really bright lamp for three-to-four days, by which point they have
shrivelled to the state that we in the west know as 'an onion'. The
ex-Russians then go back to the gardens and place the vegetable in the
ground they originally took the bulb from, and, until recently,
gardeners have been completely oblivious to the process. It is said
that the onions bitter taste is derived from the sense of
disappointment the disco dancer feels upon receiving a crummy
award.

Onion Debate #2: Why do they make you cry?

I tell you, this is a humdinger! It is not a special chemical in the
onions that attack your visual and nasal senses, as is thought by
modern biologists - far from it! The onions have a sub-sonic voice-box
in the middle of them, which transmits, at a frequency only heard by
subconscious parts of your brain, the sound of a thousand young orphans
being told that there is no Santa Claus. The natural human reaction to
such sad sounds is a bitter outpouring of grief, but, as it is only the
subconscious part of the brain that is affected, it has been commonly
misunderstood. But, recently, some blokes in a Pub discovered that,
when they jiggled their ears, scratched their behinds and sang the
theme from M*A*S*H in a drunken way, whilst onions were being prepared
in an adjacent room, that they could hear the truth for the first time.
Amazing, I think you'll agree.

Third (and final) Onion Debate: Was Elvis a Reincarnated Onion?

This is just silly and I refuse to comment on it for long, as the seven
year old girl that has theorised this was only doing it because her Mum
had stopped her candy allowance and insisted that she went to bed at
7:30. She's just trying to get attention and no serious onion lover,
like you and me, will ever take seriously the scurrilous and frankly
stupid claims of a spoilt seven-year-old brat. Do they think we're
stupid?

Anyway, hope you're well and that your frogs are hopping on the right
lily-pads.

Regards, G