Fuddland

One consequence of leaving behind the comforts of home to live an entirely different lifestyle elsewhere is, it forces one to confront those fears or performs those tasks that one has been surreptitiously avoiding for many years. Hence, I have found, not even a month into my new life in here, that I have had to develop a skill that I have been able to work around not having for nearly thirty years…

I could not eat tangerines containing pips without making a complete mess.

It wasn’t just tangerines: satsumas, clementines — essentially any segmented fruit — for here I do not have the choice of the easy-to-eat, cultivated-to-death, chew-to-your-heart’s-content seedless varieties; no sir, you either buy them with pips in or not at all, and I enjoy citrusy goodness too much to take the latter option.

I had witnessed some people pop a segment into their mouth and a mere blink of an eye later spit out the pip — sometimes after they’ve swallowed the edible component; others could perform the same task with less speed but with no more mess; but me: in went the segment, and tentatively I bit down gently along its length until I located the pip [or even pips — some of them try and fool you by containing two or even three of the buggers]. Sometimes I even held the segment up to the light in order to get a rough idea of the location of the enemy. There then followed some awkward tongue-teeth manoeuvrings in an attempt to pull apart the segment, release the pips and push them to the front of my mouth whilst keeping the fruity flesh somewhere safe elsewhere.

But more often than not I found that the pips tried a pre-emptive strike by leaping to the back of my throat and almost choking me, or the segment would just not separate enough to release its crunchy stowaways, and I had to resort to introducing my fingers to the fray, and from there on in it was just a one way trip to Messyville: sticky fingers and spillages down my shirt. It was, frankly, deeply embarrassing that, of the many skills I possess, eating non-seedless tangerines [also known simply as “tangerines”] was not one of them, and I tried my best to hide it by consuming them behind closed, locked, barricaded, sound-proofed doors, but by moving out here I have had to face my fear head on and eat copious amounts of the blighters until I managed to — somehow — develop the previously-mystical action of mouth-blink-spit. Just one more [small] advantage to uprooting and emigrating all this way.

The following is an entry which follows on from the above:

1. Bába's misunderstanding [Fuddland]. Excerpt: Walking home from school the other day, having finished for the day before my colleagues, I popped into Máma & Bába's, our local hang-out, to see if any of the other foreigners were around. Mildly disappointingly, none was to be...

#1

Gordon | 2006 / 03 / 06 – 21:43

Good to see that there are some positive benefits.

I think…

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