Strawberry gaff - not...

...


Pips was talking about strawberries and raspberries etc just now, and I remembered - with some anxiety, an occasion when I wish they'd never been invented!

My old firm used to welcome our MD down to our Sussex office occasionally, and we'd always repair to the local restaurant for a long and liquid lunch. This was about the time of 'Spitting Image', and they'd been doing sketches about Margaret Thatcher, Kinnock, etc ad nauseam - but very funny. One sketch was about Mark Thatcher being able to come and go through a flap in the back door of No 10, which claimed the description 'Prat Flap'.

Cue lunch with said MD, whom we all knew well and actually liked. He'd once told us that strawberries tasted much better with a dusting of ground black pepper, rather than cream etc, as it brought out the flavour etc. We'd all tried it and 'had' to agree of course, but when we saw him at this particular lunch, everyone had forgotten this culinary epithet.

So, the liquids continued to pour, we all got more relaxed, and the conversation wandered around cricket, work prospects and TV stories. The No 10 sketch was the masterpiece of the Scrobs end of the table and we were all laughing heartily, until Scrobs himself just mentioned when the strawberries arrived, 'Who was the chap we knew who used to put pepper on his strawberries'?

Because I worked with utter, callous, mean bastards then, I hated them all and wanted to run them all over every second of the day (not true...), the place went quiet and one of the said bastards gestured towards our MD, and muttered, 'Who was the PRAT who put pepper...???'

And I never did say that, I really, honestly never did, but to this day I've never been allowed to forget it, especially when I see the bastards who tweaked my friendly little statement, and now I hate pepper on strawberries, and I hate the bastards (again), just for good measure...

Bastards...