How To Dress

I love fresh pineapple, but in the past I have invariably regretted buying one because of the mess and stress caused trying to get into them. Well, not any more. A friend gave me a marvellous gadget-thingy for Christmas, and it takes all the hard work and carnage out of the process. It’s fantastic – you just slice the top off the fruit, screw in the gadget (like a corkscrew) and hey presto, seconds later you lift out a perfect stack of neatly formed pineapple rings, uniformly sized and shaped. It’s just so wonderful – I’m buying pineapples all the time now. I eat it for breakfast, with yoghurt; I chop it into cubes to drop into curries and chillies; I even add it to avocados and mangos to make a delicious salsa salad. So I urge any of you who has previously despaired at the thought of extracting enough fruit to warrant the effort, to rush to the shops and buy one of these pineapple-thingies right now! You won’t regret it.

Spookily enough, I’ve just remembered that a pineapple makes an appearance in the very first scene of my current novel, but that’s probably not connected in any way; just coincidence.

I couldn’t sleep again last night. I was actually woken by a mischievous text message coming through at about 3:00 a.m. so I climbed out of bed and switched on the TV. I watched the opening two games of Andy Murray’s match against Frenchman Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in the Australian Open. I wasn’t feeling too confident when I saw how Murray (No. 9 seed) struggled to win his first game compared with the ease in which the unseeded Tsonga won his. Something told me not to watch any further, so I switched off and went back to bed where I read myself to sleep. Sure enough, I awoke this morning to hear that poor Murray had suffered a first-round defeat under the glaring Aussie sun, although looking at the score it seems as if Tsonga didn’t have it all his own way and that Murray put up a good fight. I wish I’d watched the whole match now.

But what’s so funny about this is that I hear the commentator apparently changed the poor lad’s nationality within the match. When he walked onto the court he was heralded as “Britain’s Number One”, but as he bowed out just a couple of hours later, he was labelled “the Scot, Murray”. Oh, perfidious Albion!

It’s my elder daughter’s birthday today. She’s a quarter of a century old. Oh dear, what does that mean to her crumbling, decrepit old Pa? I must get to the gym today – my legs are weak and bandy and feeling like this, I’d never ever take on Andy. Which reminds me, my story about the cock-mad poet is being published this month. I look forward to it.