Simply Sue: The Cucumber Police
“The greengrocer was pinned to the parsnips by the one with no neck and jack-boots, and the chap in the black leather and the monocle had me cornered by the cauliflowers, whilst the bloodhound drooled into the beetroot…’’ The inimitable Sue Papworth imagines a day when a visit to the greengrocer’s could turn into a metric nightmare
I snuck nervously into the greengrocer’s.
It was another day for wearing the woolly balaclava, and what with that and the dark glasses, I was having problems telling the cucumbers from the fish counter.
The greengrocer emerged from what used to be the back yard, but was now the back metre.
“A pound ….” I peered about me, furtively, as I spoke, “A pound,” I went on “of your best new potatoes, please, greengrocer.”
The trembling of the fellow’s hands should have alerted me – I blame the tinted glasses, and the way they get steamed up when I try to breathe wearing my bank-robber’s kit – but before he could speak, they had leaped out from the backroom, complete with the baying hounds.
The greengrocer was pinned to the parsnips by the one with no neck and jack-boots, and the chap in the black leather and the monocle had me cornered by the cauliflowers, whilst the bloodhound drooled into the beetroot.
“She was asking,” faltered the fellow from the parsnip sack, in a surprising soprano, “for four hundred and forty-seven point three grams of potatoes….”
But it was too late. The Cucumber Police were back , and it looked like I’d been rumbled.
I’d tangled with this mob before, in the Case of the Criminal Cucumber – that time Ronnie Pogson narrowly escaped getting sent to the Horticultural Reform Farm at Wisbech for contravening the EEC’s ruling on the length of salad vegetables. (You couldn’t sell a cucumber less than 8 inches long - something to do with throwing back the little ones to give them a chance to breed - and that’s just what he was conspiring to sell me. It was a near thing, but we rapidly disguised it as a courgette, and got away with it.)
This time, I was illegally requesting Imperial vegetables, and they had me bang to rights.
The cop in the leathers threatened me with his spud gun, and the grey- faced greengrocer was cuffed in the corner whilst the fellow with the Vegometer tested his broccoli for illegal ounces.
He was really miffed that he didn’t find any. There were no stones in the baking potatoes, and even the rhubarb was in grams.
They uncuffed the greengrocer. And by a wild stroke of good fortune – his monocle had steamed up as well – I clobbered the cop on his blind side with a metre of cucumber, and made my getaway.
I’ve been underground ever since.
This is another tale from the mean streets. This is what life is like for the criminal classes who don’t know a kilogram from a radiogram, and still ask for their spuds in pounds and ounces. You have been warned.
