So, everyone knows that tomatoes don’t taste like tomatoes anymore. They look more like tomatoes than tomatoes ever did, but they don’t taste like them, right? They’re just these big red juicy looking things in the shop that, when you get them home, are pretty watery, waxy and grainy versions of a tomato.
And we all know that you have to go a long way these days to find a banana that tastes of ‘banana’ (being the ones we used to have before the war). You have to go to Asia in fact.
‘As long they buy the freakin’ thing’, right? That’s the thinking, I believe. The tomato and the banana only have to look like a nice juicy tomato or tasty banana while they’re sat on the shelf waiting to be bought. As soon as the store has your money they couldn’t care less whether you enjoy eating the thing or not. Actually that’s not true, the store does want you to come back and buy more tomatoes and bananas in the future. It’s probably more to do with the wholesalers who buy and sell this stuff on sight. I mean they don’t necessarily have to eat it and enjoy it to be impressed enough to come back and buy more. All they need to know is that the guy they sell it on to thinks that they look like tomatoes and bananas. But no, wait, the stores must be culpable too because they do all that stuff with wax and lighting and so on. Yeah.
Have you been to a restaurant lately? It makes me furious when you’re sat at a restaurant table in the year 2008 and the freakin’ thing is wobbling under your elbows. I just can’t believe that here we are, with the internet and with the ability to shoot down rogue satellites travelling at tens of thousands if miles an hour and we can’t make a table that doesn’t wobble. And I’m not being unreasonable here. We’re not talking about some table that your nephew made at school and that you have to cherish for that fact alone, we’re talking about a table in a restaurant. A professional table.
Now I have a strong opinion on this because I work in an industry where appearance is everything. It’s ok to just appear to be what you wish to seem. You don’t need a degree in law in order to appear to an audience as a lawyer. There’s nothing to stop you getting a degree if you want one; if it would make you feel better about yourself while you pretend to be a lawyer – but similarly there’s nothing to stop you eating cigarette butts and drinking vinegar before you go on stage. Whatever it takes, right? But when it comes to being a table in a restaurant that won’t do! Appearing to be a table will not do. You are required to function exactly as the paying customer would expect a table to function, that being a stable platform on which to place your meal (it would be nice if the word ‘table’ came from the word ‘stable’ but instead I think it comes from the word ‘tablet’). As a restaurateur, wouldn’t you take pride in your stuff and want to know that everything you had - glasses, cutlery, napkins – was going to work just right for your customers? You wouldn’t put out forks made of leather, would you? No. So why are we so often seated at tables that can’t keep all their feet on the ground? Look around you, it’s easy to forget how much of our manmade environment has involved the spirit level at some stage of its construction. It could even be used as a criterion for judging the natural world against the artificial. It’s one of the things that we just seem to do wherever we go; level this off, flatten that out. And yet, there we all are watching the wine trying to jump out of the glass as we chase our steaks around the plate. Oops, there goes the little vase with the flower in it. Splat, there’s a big blob of candle wax in my girlfriend’s dessert. And no-one seems to complain. No-one seems to mind.
And the same goes for tomatoes and bananas. These things we’re eating are the hookers of the food world. They offer the semblance of a tomato experience, a banana sensation, but somewhere back there their john’s are counting the money and laughing at the poor suckers who’re going to feel just as empty, just as lonely when they wake up in the morning as they were before they went to the store and were distracted by the lovely shiny, waxy, scented produce on the shelf.
Now I know that some of you out there would prefer a restaurant with prostitutes on wobbly tables but not me. No, when I come off stage having given my heart rending performance as ‘the lawyer’, and I go out to dinner with my agent, give me a nice tart tomato and a tight little Asian banana anytime. On a solid table.
