The organic vegetable box arrived today. We order milk, butter and eggs from them, too, and it’s quite exciting to see which vegetables they are giving us every week as they change weekly and with the season. The weather is still quite cold and gloomy so I decide we will have a slow-cooked casserole. Plundering the box for goodies we find, amongst other things, a bunch of purple carrots. They are deeply purple and I think they will go very nicely in the casserole. I peel them carefully and yes, they are still purple.  I have been tricked before by beautiful purple beans which, once in the saucepan, revert to green, but these carrots really and truly ARE purple. It is enough to make the heart sing. Or hum a little, at least. As I cut them into chunks, I find these purple carrots have a layer of purple and beneath that, they are ORANGE. The traitors. They promise so much in terms of colour and then fail to deliver as they are just wearing coats of purple. They go into the casserole just the same and I suspect will taste good but whether they will have shunned their purple coats by the time they are cooked we have yet to see.

It reminded me of other things that promise much but fail to deliver like Werther’s Originals. They are just butterscotch which makes them not even original. Their advertising campaign is one that drives me to distraction. A simpering woman says “I remember when Grandfather took me to my first caramel shop”. OK, Stop there. Caramel shop? What on earth is that? It is clearly something dreamed up in the minds of the advertising agency because I have never in my life seen a caramel shop. Shops that specialise in fudge or high-end chocolate but never a caramel shop. That woman in the advert is lying through her teeth. Shame on Werther’s. Not original and inventing a special kind of shop in order to sell their run-of-the-mill confectionary. It’s a similar story with Wagon Wheels. They used to be enormous, the size of a large man’s hand and now are reduced to teeny tiny things, not fit for the name Wagon Wheels. The whole point is that they were huge so to continue calling such a diminutive biscuit a Wagon Wheel is patently ludicrous. And while we’re on the subject, Jacob’s used to advertise their Club biscuits with the tag line ‘If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit join our Club’. Well, have you looked at the amount of chocolate on a Jacob’s Club biscuit lately? There is the merest hint of chocolate. Gone is the thick layer of milk chocolate (Orange *****, Raisin – yeuck, Ordinary ***) or plain chocolate (Mint *****) and we are left with a thin layer which is hardly worth it. It’s not a Club I will be joining any time soon.

On a totally separate note, I have just had my flu jab. I go to collect my prescription and there is a notice in the pharmacy saying ‘Flu Jabs! Get yours now!’ or words to that effect. I ask the pharmacist whether they are now giving flu jabs and she tells me they have been doing so for the last 4 years. I ask if I can have a flu jab. She checks my record of prescriptions and we agree it should be on the basis of low immunity. “When do you want it done? We can do it any time” she asks. I ask if she can do it now as I am there and willing. She says she can and I am shown into a small office where she warms the serum and then very efficiently jabs me in the arm. That’s it. All done. If only other things in life were so simple.