The One About Dad and Morrisons

It's 8 am on a week day morning. I'm sitting at my dining room table staring at a mouldy orange in the fruit bowl wondering at what point does the fruit look so unappetising that we subconsciously forget to eat it. I am faced with a dilemma- can I cook a delicious pudding with 5 shrivelled lemons, 2 hard brown limes, one mouldy orange and 4 blue glass marbles or should I resign them to the compost bin? Times are hard what with the economic recession/depression/crash/crisis- should I really be throwing food away?
I will resign myself to never purchasing such large quantities of citrus fruit again. How ridiculous to think that I would need that many lemons on Pancake Day that they are still sitting in my fruit bowl at the end of October!! And my limes have out-lived my Gin by about 2 months!!
Not sure how the marbles got there!!

This is my third blog now and I always find the first entry the most difficult to write. I need to get into a flow, introduce myself tentatively to my readerage (own word but I think it works!), work out what the hell I'm doing, why I am doing it and how you post photos on this entry- although thinking about it how appealing would a bowl of dead fruit be, even if it is beautifully lit?

So should I jump straight in and tell you about the time that my Dad managed to close the entire freezer section of Morrison's because he could smell burning by the frozen sausages?
Having checked out his suspicions with other shoppers, he cornered a member of staff, who summoned the store manager who in a panic switched off all the freezers and called out an electrician. He could obviously imagine the headlines in the Kent Messenger- "Hundreds saved as fire rips through store", "BBQ season gets underway early at Morrison's", "Woman dies- Mum really should have gone to Iceland!"

We don't know how long the freezers were off but we do know that Dad's smokers pipe had been smouldering away in his coat pocket for most of his trip to the supermarket. The telltale signs were small but significant- sparks flying when he pulled out his wallet plus charred material and a new hole in his pocket that hadn't been there when he entered to get his bogof tea bags!

His mind must have been on something else when he entered the store. By his own admission, he ponders. Questions race through his mind often keeping him awake at night: "why do they call it evaporated milk when you can still see it?? Do public lavatory attendants take their holidays at their own convenience? Why would you travel somewhere over a rainbow just to weigh a pie?"
The man clearly needs a hobby!!

The good news is that whilst I have been contemplating what to write, I have eaten the last 4 edible oranges. The fruit bowl is empty, the mouldy and shrivelled fruit is sitting in a line on the table awaiting its fate and I think I have found a new home for the marbles- I'm going to give them to my Dad to replace the ones that over the years he has lost. Bless him.