Peel me a grape!

One of the many pleasures in foreign travel is being able to glut yourself on what would be hothouse fruits in this country but which are available ‘cheap as chips’ in the country that you happen to be visiting.

I remember once incident in Istanbul during one of my perambulations consequent on getting lost.

(By the way, the ‘lost traveller system’ is a technique I heartily recommend as an excellent way of getting to know a part of a city and its inhabitants. People usually go out of their way to get you back to a hazily understood destination described in any language to hand. Even if they have absolutely no idea of where you want to go and are totally and unutterably foreign with nary a word of the Emperor of Languages, English, they will all have very decided opinions about which direction you should go. Helpfulness personified part of the great fellowship of humanity, and all that. Though, thinking about it, it could be, of course, that they merely want to get you out of their lives, but that is far too pessimistic a view of our fellow Johnnie foreigner for me to contemplate.)

Anyway, lost as I was; hungry and thirsty, but taking a keen interest in the colourful Turkish drivers taking no interest in the colour of the traffic lights, I decided that I would have to help the local economy and buy something from the street traders lining the thoroughfare. I decided, from the plethora of vegetation on offer to settle for grapes. By various facial grimaces and hand gestures the man weighed out a bunch of grapes, put them into a cone of brown paper and then held up the number of fingers for the total amount of lira that would complete this quaint interchange. It was at this point that I realised that the man who was smiling in anticipation of my cash was actually charging an exorbitant amount of money for the grapes. I was immediately furious: here was this man taking a poor tourist for a ride. But, I had been in Istanbul for two days, I was no greenhorn, I was a seasoned resident in the city, I was wise to the ways of wily street traders – and told him so in loud and fluent English. To which the man immediately replied in louder and more loquacious Turkish. This could have gone on for some time in the tradition of the best of all regulated discussions where what one side was saying was not only irrelevant to the development of the argument it was also, literally, incomprehensible. The contretemps was brought to an end by a polyglot passer-by who soothed both our tempers. I paid less and the trader scowled. I walked on eating my grapes with rather more vigour than was strictly necessary for a soft fruit, but secure that right had triumphed. No gullible fool I. No indeed! It was as I was walking and eating (a multi tasking feat which put me in touch with my feminine side) that I realised that the amount of money over which I had been in dispute was the British equivalent of 2p!

In my defence I did feel ashamed and I immediately set about forming a defence for my actions. (You’ll note that I didn’t return to the trader and give him the difference.) And eventually came to the conclusion that I had adopted the Turkish system of values and that, in Turkish terms the amount of lira was significant, even if it really wasn’t to me. It sounds a bit weak, doesn’t it? Well, it’s the best that I could do.

But that attitude is around today; best seen in petrol. Every driver needs petrol. No driver knows the cost of petrol. You ask anyone the cost of a litre of petrol and they will start flannelling and say something like, “Depends on where you go” and that is exactly my point. Drivers drive around for the best value, thus wasting the gain in the amount of time and petrol that they waste in their search.

For me (I buy my petrol from Tesco, ‘cos it’s easy) the nit picking analysis of best buy comes to the fore when I am buying water.

I think (I know) that the purchase of water in a country when the stuff that comes though the taps has been shown (by Which amongst others) time and time again to be of exceptional purity, is one of the most stupidly fatuous purchases you could possibly make. The fact that we buy French (French!) water makes me nearly speechless with the total follie de grandeur of it all. The further fact that some idiots actually buy Fijian water at a cost which places it on the same level as wine is surely a pathetic upper middle class attempt to ape the grandiloquent gesture of Queen Elizabeth dissolving a pearl in vinegar and drinking it. At least she thought that it was going to do something more than quench her thirst! Tesco gave me a choice of all the home countries to squander my money on. Which should it be? The rugged, heather infused peaty fluidity of Highland Scotland or the loquacious smoothness of the Emerald Isle, or could the well bred, spiky class of the English tempt? Surely I would pick the liquid essence of the sheep trod hills of my own country? Ballocks to the lot of it.

The only reason I buy water at all is because Toni insists on it. I therefore spent ten minutes debating which of the thieving organizations was going to take the least of my cash. Tesco of course, do not make that easy to work out. The usual trick of pricing the water using price per litre and well as price per 100 ml was well to the fore. To complicate things further they had a selection of special offers. Special offers on water! Just say it and you’ll see how stupid it sounds. It does actually drop from the sky, placing it in a different category say, from bread. Anyway, special offers which were on buying one and getting another at a different price; special offers of a simple reduction; special offers because other stores sell them at higher prices. It was a mathematical jungle, but I was determined to hack my way though the lianas of misinformation, confusion and deceit that Tesco uses to bewilder its customers and get to the cheapest. I did. I came away thinking that I had waged a war of sense against the cynical leer of capitalism and I had been victorious. But, rather like that younger version of myself eating grapes, I came away with a saving of 2p!

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.