Almost a lifetime of reading Michel Hanson. And bananas!

Our daughter was a troublesome teenager. This was something of a surprise as her older brother had gone from child to pre-teen to teenager without causing any hassle whatsoever. She, however, went from charmingly determined little girl to slightly stroppy pre-teen to full-blown rebellious teenager, pushing against any kind of boundaries. Okay, I exaggerate. Most if the time she was fine but, like the little girl with the little curl in the middle of her forehead, when she was bad she was horrid.

Back when our daughter was a troublesome teenager, the estimable Michel Hanson had a regular column in the newspaper: Treasure. In this column she told tales of the trials and tribulations of life with her teenage daughter, aka Treasure. Her daughter was maybe a year or two older than ours but everything she wrote resonated. Our poor daughter must have grown heartily sick of my falling about laughing and then reading out the latest entertaining mishap in the life of Treasure and her mother.

Years later, Michele Hanson regaled us with tales of her ailing, increasingly senile mother. Entertaining (in its sad way) as it was, this series of articles did not hit home quite so strongly with me. Fortunately my mother had been bright as a button to the end, even when physically very weak. Besides, the burden of care did not fall on me so much as on my elder sister. My other siblings and I were the ones who popped in from time to time to give a bit of support but my older sister, who lived around the corner from our mother and who took her into her own hime when she grew too frail to look after herself, was the main carer. It often falls out that way in families.

That bit of nostalgia was prompted by my coming across an article about bananas, written by Michel Hanson, of course. She in turn was prompted to write that by recent revelations that in the UK was regularly thrown away 1.4m edible bananas every day at a cost of £80m a year. Shocking! (This comes as part of a report that the average family throws out £700 worth of food every year.) People don't like bananas that have grown too ripe; indeed, most people don't even like them to be remotely yellow and a bit speckled. They prefer them pale green! That is why so many people complain that bananas are indigestible. Personally I like them nicely speckled - truly the best way to eat them!

So Michel Hanson wrote this piece extolling the virtues of bananas and suggesting thing you can do with them when they become really too ripe for direct consumption.

This is my favourite bit of her article:

"Bananas can also help you to answer the big questions in life: is there a God? Am I ever going to be happy? And such like. You may not know this, but if you cut the very end off a banana (the pointy bit at the bottom end, not the stem end), you will find that the cut exposes a black dot, or a black Y. Ask the important question, then take a look: a dot means “no”, a Y means “yes”."

It beats reading chicken entrails any day!