We have a wonderful “health food” shop just up the road – well stocked, everything you could possibly ask for and lots of stuff you don’t want to know about.
We shop there a lot – the fresh fruit and veges are excellent, they have wonderful fresh bread every day, and if you get there at the right time the really expensive meat is reduced cos they’re a couple of days away from the use by date and they really need to get rid of it.
Which is of course the issue with all these places – they’re bloody expensive. But I don’t mind paying for, for example, carrots that taste like the ones that came out of my Dad’s garden instead of the woody dull specimens in the shop over the road.
So I’ll cop the prices, but what REALLY gives me the shits is the freshly washed maidens serving (and it’s all females) – they all look and talk like they were head prefects five minutes ago, with their clean light blue uniforms and lovely smiles and robo-speak salutations. I just wish they’d show a bit of something real and non-perfect, something that goes with the “health food shop” thing of being “natural”.
OK, that’s all, as you were, back to the Depeche Mode re-releases and obscure Scando jazz duos and long lost New Zealand pikelet recipes…
“I just wish they’d show a bit of something real and non-perfect” – dude, this is a safe space and all, but let’s be careful.
Show a bit, huh?
I am sort of minded of this, uncertain why….
I hear you. You want a dirty girl bagging up your dirty carrots.
Behave yourselves boys…
We don’t have a “health food” shop as such but we do have an indoor and outdoor market and the fruit and veg are superb. The 3 or 4 ladies who work on the stall are probably in their mid 60s and are always smiling and full of cheer. I refer to them as the Dirty Girls. When I enquire if they have any dirty carrots I do so in a mock lascivious way that despite repeated airing never fails to amuse them all. Occasionally one of them will hint that she has something else even dirtier that I can buy whereupon she’ll produce some Cheshire potatoes or a beetroot caked in soil from under the table. There is nothing quite like being in your very own Carry On film week in week out.
Do you get many of them to the pound?
There is something of the Beryl Cook about them.
The best veg for this kind of purpose is a butternut squash. Very often they look like that thing that Adrienn Corri gets killed with in A Clockwork Orange. But deliberately buying the rudest-looking one in the shop would be just childish.
…er…
Funnily enough the Dirty Girls and I have avoided going down the rude shaped fruit and veg line of humour. Possibly because it’s no big deal on market stalls where it’s all just the same good food irrespective of shape or size. Either that or it’s because we no longer have the benefit of That’s Life every Sunday evening to remind us that carrots can look like knobs and upon that kind of humour was an Empire built.
Are you saying the dirty carrot joke isn’t a knob joke?
Asking for a friend.
Not always. I mean have you seen one of those “split” carrots?
*blushes on behalf of a friend*
They’re naturally purple, you know.
Mine isn’t.
That bloody Esther Rantzen. For years she had vegetables which looked like genitalia on her stinking telly show. Send in one photo of a todger which looks like a cucumber, and the police get called.
Yours angrily,
HMP12765 of Parkhurst.
Shrink-wrapped for safety?
I feel your pain. Mainly because I’m sitting on a large courgette.
Don’t tell me, you asked for a couchette but you didn’t have your teeth in.
Yesh. Teeth currently shtuck in an undercooked corn on the cob.
Can you do any other James Bonds?
My Bob Holness James Bond is exemplary.
“Can I have Q please M?”
Amazing. It’s like Bob’s in the room with me!
I can boast to actually having a P next to Bob at a journalism awards do.
He was having a Gold Run!
Sounds very corporate. I take it you’re not blaming the employees themselves for complying with mandatory uniform, personal hygiene and customer service codes.
Perhaps you could contact management to request a bit of leg hair, maybe a bit of bawdy chatter over the beansprouts.
That’s the thing, it’s all very corporate, which I hate anyway. I’m such an old hippie…
I once attempted bawdy chatter over the beansprouts but the lady in the shop said she wasn’t falling for that old water chestnut.
That kind of knockback is enough to make your bok choy wilt.
There was certainly no chance of any purple sprouting in the broccoli department.
You made me look for a Depeche Mode thread about the rereleases they have just announced. Astonishingly, there isn’t one. Yet.
Sort of related to the OP, as a parent of nippers I sometimes go to the McDonalds Drive-“thru”. I pull up to the speaker board and it goes something like this :
(Bright, cheery, perfect diction, BBC TV presenter-type young voice) “Hello! Welcome to Mcdonalds! Please speak your order when you’re ready”
Once I start to speak – a new (real) voice responds to me that is the complete opposite in terms of vim and Joie de Vivre. It amuses me more than it should.
Chill. It’s not a conspiracy. They were head girls and prefects five minutes ago. They have been recruited because they are capable of recognising a vegetable when they see one, especially in the form of a curmudgeon bean. They are so young that they have not yet developed any active “gnarl” genes; they are still running on being nice to people by behaving blandly and regurgitating the bumptious twaddle they were told they should utter in the face of unspeakably awful customers. Give them time. You are old, experienced and jaded. They have all that to look forward to. Eat your quinoa, lay off the sarcasm. Oh, and check for visible bogies before you get there.
On occasion, a couple of times a month, I need the company stamp (to stamp documents, it’s all rock n roll in my job) and the girl (under 30) that keeps this stamp is usually occupied doing other things. Said stamp is kept in one of her drawers and so I ask her if I can rummage around her drawers, to which she replies “Of course, do excuse my dirty drawers, rummage away”
I thought I may be taking things a little close to Sid James territory but if I don’t say this now the other girls in the office, and her, make comments about said girl’s drawers and I have to go down the permission to rummage line before they are all, ahem, satisfied.
At times I feel ike I am turning into Swiss Tony from The Fast Show!
Rummaging in a woman’s drawers can be a slippery slope.
One for Moosey, ahem.
Permission to Rummage – early Darkness bootleg.
It’s been nagging at me all day, which songwriter would use the thread title for a song. It’s not Dylan or Young, for a while I thought it might be Jonathan Richman, and then it struck me – it’s Tom Waits in a song that would turn out to be about either their sleazy secret lives or how they belittled the real protagonist.
The well-scrubbed girls in the health food shops
They got the Rizla papers in their jeans
This man comes in, says he’s vegan but she knows he’s meat
And he’s sniffing round the herbs like it’s oregano Tuesday
She got big dreams and split peas and her freshly-washed blouse
So she offers him quinoa but he’s here for her couscous
He says Don’t mess with my grains baby I’m fixing a cassolet
and she smiles and says Honey I got nothin’ but thyme
*clangggg*
👏👏👏
Well Shorty quit the bars and now he hits the health food store.
Them well-scrubbed girls give him the eye but he’s after something more.
They sell him soy and chick-peas and ginseng by the score
But they ain’t the sort of pulse and root that Shorty wants to score.
*long low distant foghorn …. taken from the Time-Life Sound Effects library*
Not Tom Waits. Definitely Momus territory. It could be the start of a verse from Closer to You (see below) one of his finest…
Never miss a opportunity for innuendo with the like minded. With the unlike minded, be ready to be matronized. Be sure in your distinction.
Does it count as innuendo if she just says, “Bloody hell, that looks like a big cock!”
Works if you are buying poultry: I once bought my wife a couple of frisky black cocks for Christmas, and she was delighted.
Plucked?
Brings a whole new meaning to BBC iPlayer.
Standard or HD?
Full Brazilian once I’d given them a proper seeing-too.
Ah, ready to be buttered-up and stuffed.
Hello @Kollaren.
We always welcome newcomers to the site. You’ve posted three comments about cannabis products. But, the really important thing is what you think about music. Do you prefer The Beatles or The Stones? How do find Mavis Staples’s latest? Are there any tracks you think are irredeemably shite? Once we’ve got to know each other better, we might explore if you are Remain or Leave.
More than three if you count his/her previous identity.
But it fair makes me dewy-eyed, reminiscing about the “special interest” poster on the previous site, with his/her barrage of offers of !the best digital watches! in staccato English…
Also: the blue links are tight..
Favourite track: Toto Coelo – I Eat Cannabinoids