Another pink lady

I mentioned some unsatisfactory  pink ladies from New Zealand on 17th September last, following up on the 29th. Pink ladies being a variety of apple which I had first come across in an article explaining that MacDonalds bought an awful lot of them to put in their pies. My own early purchases were very satisfactory:  perhaps a little bland, but of good size & texture and slightly sharp.

The other day the chap in the market at Epsom had a great pile of them. They looked well enough and so I bought five of them for £1.50 (or perhaps £2.00), declining the offer on ten as they were rather large apples and I could not be sure of the quality by looking. As it turned out, five was about right. Not a bad apple, better than some of the stuff on sale at Tesco's and Sainsbury's at the moment, but not perfect. They had lost their first freshness. All was revealed by inspecting the label to find that they came from Chile, which, on the assumption that they ripen late summer there, means that the apples are maybe four or five months old here. We are clearly in the land of cunning storage, but not that cunning as these apples were starting to show the same signs of inner rot as those bought nearly a year ago now. Furthermore, one of the apples was a mutant as one of the pips had sprouted inside the apple, with the sprout being getting on for a centimeter long, something I have never seen before. Did I ought to report this disturbing occurrence to the Horticultural Development Council (http://www.hdc.org.uk/)? Would an outfit with such a broad remit take an interest in the humble pink lady? Would we have done better in the good old days of the Apple & Pear Development Council? Would I do better at http://www.englishapplesandpears.co.uk/? Or is it really a matter for which ever government department does international trade?

While I am in moan mode, I should also mention the existence of call centres which specialise in cold calling people on behalf of major charities, the likes of Oxfam and RNIB being said by a recent DT (11th August) to use such outfits. Some of this cold calling is quite aggressive. I dare say that using professional outfits to extract money out of people does produce the results, produce better results than the charities concerned were likely to produce under their own steam, but I find it faintly distasteful. As I have said before in these pages, I was comfortable in the days when charitable giving was a quiet and usually private affair: one did not make a parade of giving and the charities did not behave like people who sell conservatories & decking. I regret the passing of those days - although it is hard to argue against the likes of Oxfam raising more money.

I should also add that I have never been troubled by such a call center myself. All hearsay.

In the same vein, I regret the passing of the days when suitable retiring professionals, having done their thing out in the big wide world, were content to come in and run charities more or less for peanuts, and find the sort of salaries that the bosses of the big charities seem to require these days more than faintly distasteful. Almost as bad as the greed of the bosses of some of our academic institutions, a greed which coexists with many of their subordinates, the chaps at the coal face, being on zero hours contracts.