I Too Have Held a Cabbage and Looked to Windward

This is not the way that we like to arrange our artichokes, not here at the beginning of the day. We have seen how all those small rotund welsh canteen manageresses gather in the dawn’s early morning gloom to point at the radishes with something approaching scorn and derision in their eyes. I too have held a cabbage and looked to windward, so I understand how you can look at those poor wizened organic carrots with what is little more than disdain.

I remember when we used to talk of cucumbers and of tomatoes, but we were young then and in love, so we thought we knew all there ever was to know about fruit and vegetables… or so we thought.

Then I caught you with that courgette and I recognised that look in your eye. I remember how the bananas I had bought for you fell from my grasp and it seemed I could almost actually feel my plums shrivelling as I stood there watching you, courgette in one hand and recipe book in the other…. I knew it was over then.

Somehow, though, despite the odds, we found ourselves still together when that cauliflower came into our lives, and it was never the same again for either of us. We began to talk, tentatively at first, of leeks and cabbage and other more exotic vegetables we had fantasised about like asparagus, artichokes, aubergines and squash, but had never dared to try. You spoke of your love of sprouts and I told you my deepest pineapple fantasies, and somehow we found ourselves hand in hand next to the vegetable aisle in Tesco, and we knew our lives together would never be the same again.