Siamese Grapes

Hmmm…this may not turn out quite as Coco had hoped..ah well here goes.

In the old days people used to write letters. Some of you will not even know what a letter could be different than these characters that we use to spell out words, but these different kind of letters were rather like posts in in this forum except that they had been written by hand using a pen to scribe letters out on a piece of paper. Such letters were greeted with great enthusiasm when they arrived in your house. They may have come from another part of the world and it may have taken several weeks to reach you (in those days in the UK you could send a letter in the morning and by the afternoon it would have reached and have been read by its recipient, but the postal service in the rest of the world was not quite as efficient as that. Since those days the UK has worked very hard to reach the same standard as the rest of the world). Often these letters would begin with an interesting story or description of an unusual event before going on to the real subject matter. Interesting things might be like, well, so much seems to revolve around those endless pictures of what is on the plate in front of you today, but it might be that you would be interested to know what I, the writer, of the letter had for breakfast this morning. Well, of course you are! Most of the time it was quite different, like the lady from sub-Saharan African who announced in her opening words that they had had a new toilet installed at their house. The choice of the preposition at is deliberate and accurate.

In fact one of these letter writers did so think that you would be interested in breakfast. Coco knew some people who worked in Brazil, well, actually in the Amazon basin, just a little way up the river…sorry it is easier to say down from the source a few hundred miles or so. Some would say the area was uncivilised, but there was a civil society among the tribes, just not the sort of civil society that you or Coco would expect, though Coco supposes today they are as busy posting into the forum of social media as anyone else. We would have called them hunter gatherers. Well one day, actually it was probably in a quarterly letter so far they were from any kind of even an irregular postal system, we were introduced to a typical breakfast, which could only be consumed of course after you had actually gone out of the village circle to gather it. French snails are interesting, aren’t they? Prawns, those cockroaches of the sea, are consumed in their millions. Aardvarks are known by another name which betrays their voracious diet. Well, here it is a five star Amazonian breakfast…

No, the grapes are not an illustration of that breakfast. Coco thought better of it. Coco changed his mind. Coco repented. It might put you off anything else that you might eat or want to eat today, or even for the rest of the week as ‘it’, the breakfast, preys upon your mind.

So let him turn to the point of this tale. The photograph is not there to show you what Coco had for supper, or anyone else had for breakfast, though it might actually do that, but to point out a fault in the grapes. There is probably also a fault in the image of the grapes, but Coco takes responsibility for that.

Should Coco take them back to the store which sold them and complain about their lack of quality control? Is this a defective grape, or has it been genetically modified? Or is it a twin? That is incorrect, are they Siamese twin grapes? Is it edible? Does the mechanism which controls twinning in grapes also produce other intensely kenotic or phthartic metabolic agents which would be toxic if ingested? These and many other similar thoughts and questions swim around as it were in a delirium.

Answers to these and many other questions may be sent on a postcard please to all of your friends. And if every one of those friends send this message, and any further messages, on on the day of receipt within one month the postal services would have to deliver approximately π billiard tonnes of postcards on the next day, if any postcards were available to be had.