2002-06-11 - 11:06 a.m.

In the midst of life, we are in debt.

A couple of weeks ago, when I wasn�t scrabbling around in the dust for pennies, subsisting on boiled rice and having to buy obscure anomolies such as Turkish ketchup, I was in my local grocery store, making the kind of purchases that reasonable members of society make � bottle of wine, cigarettes from a country that I�d actually heard of, food items not rotting in some fetid corner of the �reduced to clear� section (reduced to clear any chance of a biochemical incident in the chilled goods aisle as far as I can tell).

I�m at the checkout, absentmindedly thinking how close I must be to a paying job, when the weirdly stunted but friendly Cypriot owner trundles in with something in his hand. �What is this, please?� he said, holding out some shrivelled yellow blob. �I don�t know,� I replied, thinking it was something I�d dragged into the shop off the streets, �It�s not mine.� �No, no, no,� he went on, �What is the name in English of this fruit?� It looked like some genetically-dwarved yellow pepper, and I had never even seen one before, though he seemed to have bucketloads of them, perhaps supplied by the government. I admitted I was unfamiliar with that particular variety. He seemed not to believe me, and pulled out another one, this time, green and kind of spikey and a bit kiwi-fruit-y but not quite. �How do you spell THIS one in English?� Again, I was stumped. What WERE these? Did I know the names of ANY fruits? Or did I unknowingly suffer from some kind of congenital retardation that had failed to surface until this grocer threw his demanding Mediterranean spotlight into it? I grabbed it and pretended to inspect it more closely, and turned to the woman behind me in the queue, �Er, what is it that these are called?� I said ungrammatically, as if the name was on the tip of my tongue. �I not know in eeengleesh, but in Spain they are (insert unfamiliar Spanish word here)�. �Ah yes!� chirped up the Cypriot, �I have heard that name, but I do not know the English, and nor does this English man.� I was ready to defend myself when the wife chips in and asks me to spell �Plantains� (I looked it up just now), which was enough to finish me off and send me reeling from the shop, convinced of a some international fructal conspiracy against me � just because I don�t like pears? I see these so-called fruits are still unlabelled, which means they still haven�t found out the names, or have decided to�keep them from me. I now have exotic produce paranoia. Great.