Squish

Bought some squash today. Wow! I can hear you cry, how can I lead such an exciting existence Jane? Please tell me. It's hard you know I don't think you're ready for it yet. Are you emotionally ready to choose a new cooker? Well, other than being able to deal out a bit of sarcasm and not being made to write lines for it, one of the many small pleasures of being an adult for me is being able to buy the nice tasting squashes, you know the ones that have actually seen an orange, or a blackberry, or a "summer fruit." The ones that say, expensive and possibly bad for your teeth.

When I was a child, we didn't have those exciting possibly fruit derived squashes oh no we had the "own label" ones. They were the mad bad inventions of mad bad people in labs somewhere, who had never ever seen or tasted an orange or any other fruit that could be made into a soft drink for children not they, which explains why the drinks they produced bore such little relationship to the fruit whose names they sullied.

Bright orange in the container (even if they were supposed to be lemon) once diluted to homeopathic concentrations by my mum they were the palest, most translucent of tangerines. They tasted of nothing else as well, not like oranges or lemons or even water, they tasted, well weird, sort of chemically and chalky with nasty after taste.

And another thing which really riled me, my Mum seemed to always ignore the ads on telly for the nice juices like Kia Ora or Robinson's. It was always a treat when we went to my Grandmother's she had real orange squash, made so strong my little brother and I would have been climbing the walls with over excitement if we had had e number related hyperactivity in the 70s. That was real orange juice I'm telling you.

All this came flooding back to me this morning as I was stood in Waitrose with Simon trying to choose a squash, they were all there "hi" juices lined up promising delights, the organic préssés (you pay extra for the accents above the é's you know) of elderflower, berries, rose hip. And then there were the own labels, lemon, orange, summer fruits, exotic fruits, sugar free and e number innocent. I could buy anything I liked...

I don't dilute it as much as my mum did, alright!