Reading the News
With each edition of today’s Evening News,
a free banana. And no, this is not a wind-up
or some poetic artifice at work on your
subconscious – the banana means nothing
other than itself. You can read the news,
banana in hand, and with each mouthful,
the page will soften its focus until only
the horoscope feels like harder copy
than the banana’s flesh. If you decide,
on the basis of today’s experience,
that tomorrow’s banana cannot come
soon enough, the early editions will carry
a free DVD of a Hollywood movie no one
has never seen. But a banana will pop up
in the imagination around the one-hour mark.
If you try a banana once, you can’t stop.
*
However, I suspect the free banana, in reality, had something to do with this story. Someone within the editorship of the Edinburgh Evening News must have a sense of humour.
An excerpt:
"Enter a £7 million programme entitled Lean Thinking - funded by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. Sounds good, doesn't it?...
The idea is that your desk is marked out with black tape denoting the locations of every piece of essential equipment. Your pen has a place. Your paper clips have a place. However, that cute picture of your baby boy or the banana you are planning to eat at lunchtime have no place.
Objects are either "active" or "inactive" and - I kid you not - a banana only counts as active if you are about to eat it in the next few seconds. Otherwise, it must be removed along with all those inactive pictures or ornaments that help jolly up a dull desk job."
