The ubiquity of Bananas

A small part of your mind is thinking, he's just invented that phrase as some kind of teaser to drag me into his blog, which is probably about politics or horses or something...

Another part of your mind is thinking... bananas, you know, I do see a lot of them...

So, I'm away for the weekend, in the UK... And I'm sitting on a train, wondering and gawping at the many wonderous and strange sights... hoping to see streets paved with gold etc...

Well, actually, I was on a train, ruminating about the similarities and differences between a train at night in one country and another... because this was only England, south coast, there really wasn't a vast world of difference in the appearance of the people... Equally, the fundamental design of the train was the same... As was the general, sodium light, passing at speed, urban landscape...

And then it occured to me as I watched a commuter, snacking on a banana... That the banana itself was the oddest thing in the picture... Where do bananas grow? Hot, tropical places... How well do they travel? Not very well, judging by the amount of damage a small group can sustain in the transition between the supermarket and my house... How quickly do they ripen and decline? Pretty darn quickly, unless they've been evilly frozen by an uncaring gobal conglomerate - in which case they go a kind of startled brown...

And yet they are in fact nearly ubiquitous in our daily lives - we just take their presence for granted, whether in some grotty Spar shop, or in some high end organic fruiteria....

And then, I mentioned them to a dear friend who has a grasp of trivia that is second only to his knowledge of Evan Dando... He assured me that the sale of bananas is a key performance indicator for supermarkets... although in truth, anything more than a cursory search on Google, leaves me confused about the accuracy of that statement, but let's imagine for a moment that it's true...

If you're in the mood to have a look here

Anyway, my point, more or else is we live in a furiously modern age - where we take for granted so many things... Let's stop a moment - and enjoy a banana... and remember just how complicated the process of getting that banana, into our hands, or onto our trains, in a perfectly ripe and edible condition really is...