Oh, for goodness sake

 I am an absolute shocker at spilling food. I see other women are, too. You have to have an eagle eye to examine in close detail the photos of secondhand tops for sale on eBay, because so many of them have little telltale stains on the front where someone's salad dressing has dripped.

Some eBay vendors are really quite brazen about this — they have the nerve to ask you £23 (or some such unreasonable sum) for a garment that only cost about £30 in the first place, belonged to an old lady, and now has a mini-waterfall of ex-lunch decorating the centre front. 

But last night I really did excel myself. In the evenings, in appropriate seclusion from the rest of the household, Tony watches TV programmes like Wheeler Dealers (where they do up wrecked cars and sell them on) and sport, and Dragon's Den (marketing burns as a Perpetual Light in the sanctum of his soul). Meanwhile, in the adjacent room, the female contingent of the household watches the property programmes — Homes Under The Hammer, A Place In The Sun, Escape To The Country (we would like that) — and programmes about forensic detective cases, animal rescue, border force work, and helicopter ambulances. 

Yesterday I made myself a plate of supper (pizza and salad) and sat down in my nook to watch a really interesting programme about the work of the emergency ambulance service in north-west England during the height of the pandemic. Oh, the pressure on those poor paramedics during those scary months! Part of the programme was filmed at the time of Storm Christopher, when the river Mersey flooded, so not only were the emergency services inundated with calls from panicky people who had tested positive for Covid, sent home to isolate, and now couldn't breathe or were going into cardiac arrest, but when the ambulance tried to reach them the roads were flooded. And then when they got them to Accident and Emergency, the hospitals were full and they just had to sit outside with the sick person in the ambulance while high-priority calls stacked up at the central switchboard. They were so patient and cheerful and brave. And a five-year-old child rang in, alone at home with her mother who had collapsed. And they were called out to a homeless man who had Covid, and none of his friends or relatives would let him come and stay with them, and none of the hostels, because everyone was too frightened of catching the virus. So he sat outside on the street in the freezing rain of the storm, with nowhere to go.

It was a riveting programme.

But right at the beginning of it, I sat down with my plate of supper, and the first thing I ate was a small beetroot (in apple vinegar; very nice). 

Now, I am not your organised woman who has a table and a knife and fork — mostly of what I eat is either with a spoon or my fingers, depending if it's Bits or Sludge. I'd cut my pizza into bits in the kitchen before I took my plate through, and the salad part consisted of a wedge of lettuce, a row of radishes and a row of beetroots. All of which is my idea of something you eat with your fingers. Radishes and beetroot are fiendishly hard to eat with a fork anyway, because the radishes will have none of it and refuse to be speared, and the beetroot shoots away (with remarkable  velocity) from the pressure of the fork.

So I commenced my supper by picked up a small pickled beetroot with my fingers. And I dropped it. And it rolled all the way down the front of my shirt. 

Still, as Hebe remarked at the time, I couldn't have chosen a better shirt to drop beetroot on. This was the shirt when I took it off to wash.

Can you see the beetroot stains? No? I could have sold that to you on eBay, couldn't I (apart from you probably think the shirt is hideous, which it is in a way, but I like it). The beetroot — lefthand side in the pic — made the rather pinker abstract patches. The more muddy purple similar patch, to the right beside that blueish flower, is just part of the shirt. Or that's what they said on eBay. Perhaps it has been owned by a whole succession of beetroot eaters. Like those people Van Gogh knew who ate potatoes.

I see they used forks — well, most of them did anyway.

The shirt having its particular coloration, I didn't rush to wash out the stains even though it was beetroot. I felt a certain level of destiny would probably apply in any case, because you know what beetroot is like to wash out of anything. Or blackberry. I waited until the ambulance programme had finished — and until I had eaten my choc ice (mint Magnum as it happens), because I am a star at losing shards of dropped chocolate into my clothing as well. But, of good news, when I did change my shirt and washed the beetrooty one, having sprayed it first with the Oxy-whatsit stuff, all the stains came out, no problem. Which goes to show that cheapo polyester-cotton may be part of the procession of shame when it comes to environmental responsibility (just as pizza and choc ice have their own special place in every nutritional gallery of shame) but there's a reason old ladies are resigned to choosing it for their clothing.

Beetroot. Wear it with pride.