A short story, containing nothing much about something in particular, ending somewhere in particular, and going nowhere much

One fine morning that happened to be this fine morning, the Baron and myself found ourselves in the Preston shopping centre. We weren't in the shopping centre for any particular reason, we just found ourselves pulled to it, like a minor planetary body pulled towards a gigantic quasar black hole at the centre of the galaxy. Anyway, since we were in the shopping centre, we decided to do a little shopping, just for the fun of it.

We didn't of course do shopping for anything ordinary, like detergent, pasta, bread, or vegetables. The strategy that we followed was, instead, to move towards the strangest, most exotic and curious looking fruit in the entire shopping centre, and buy that instead. We found in one box a little spiky thing, a bit smaller than a tennis ball and coloured brownish red. The sign said that it was a 'Rambutan', but I would never have been able to place that name to that little red-brown spiky thing, or vice versa, if asked. We duly put one - just one, mind - of these things into our shopping cart and trundled off to the checkout counter.

The chap at the checkout was even more perplexed than I was by the spiky-tennis-ball-thing in the bottom of our cart. And his checkout chap machine was even more so. If I couldn't place a shape to the name 'Rambutan', he could barely place a name to the shape, either, or for that matter a name to the name (he called it 'Rembuntan'.) He called for assistance. His computer called for assistance. The people that he called to for assistance called other people for assistance. I toddled over to the fruit aisle where we'd got it from, found the price, and came back to find that someone had already got the price. The sole Rambutan was duly loaded into our bag, and we emerged blinking into the daylight, triumphant in the knowledge that we had won our Rambutan. Whatever, in fact, it was.

Now all that remains is to eat it. I'm a little worried about this bit actually. Maybe we should have a Rambutan party, and cut up the little-red-spiky-tennis-ball thing into little bits, and share them out to everyone at the party. Or maybe we could turn it into a stew. A little red, spiky, tennis-ball flavoured stew. I'm open to suggestions.

This has been one in a series of blog posts about fruit!