I once had a shop in Greystones - a food emporium. A small old-fashioned greengrocer that stocked your usual fruit and veg with some exotica like mangos, wild mushrooms, etc as well as olives, buffalo mozzarella and tins of this and jars of that. One of the best products to be had in this delightful bazaar was the jams and marmalades. This was no ordinary jam but the best in Ireland. Made by an industrious elderly couple in their kitchen in Newtownmountkennedy, he growing the fruit, she making the jam, they supplied only a handful of small shops in north Wicklow.
Anyway, as you can imagine the work was hard but the crack was mighty and the staff and I enjoyed ourselves no end. Sometimes, even, the customers provided the entertainment.
One man brought us on many occasions to tears with the gut-bursting laughter and puerile innuendo. Old and very unattractive, dressed in a long black leather overcoat (think gestapo) and matching trilby, in all weathers, he would visit every week or so and buy our total stock of raspberry jam. Needless to say we came to rather filthy conclusions as to what he exactly did with so much of our jam (as no-one could possibly eat this amount in a week) and that old leather outfit of his. We christened him 'Raspberry Jam Man'. Seedy was the word and not just the jam.
Picture the scene when he would rather slowly walk in wearing his grin (for he knew we knew), ask for all the raspberry jam we had and poor me (I always got the weirdos) serving the old perv and the staff sniggering into their sleeves in the store out the back. The female members of the crew took a particular dislike to him and wouldn't serve him, much to his disappointment as he would tilt and strain his head to see if he could get a glimpse of the girls hiding (and giggling like 11-year-olds) in the back store. I on the other hand resented this man. Why should he get all the raspberry? Keep a few for the others, the normal customers who bought stuff for normal dietary reasons. So I would tell him that I could only sell him eight of the ten jars as we had other people who delighted in this treat. He didn't like that.
The story only became stranger when, by a remarkable fluke of serindipity we discovered what this man does by day: he is, and I do not lie, a medical Doctor.
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Any chance of finding the recipe for the jam ?
ReplyDeleteDid that old couple have a license to make/sell jam and did you make sure that the product was safe for human consumption? Maybe it was a wonderdrug and the old Doc was prescribing ti to his customers!!
ReplyDeleteYer becoming fairly prolific of late, my son. And have taken up a slightly more literary style. This one may even have worked better had you made it into a short story.
ReplyDeleteKeep it up.
That counter is a cod - every time I refresh the page it goes up one. At the moment it says 41 and I think 37 of them were me in the last half hour!
ReplyDeleteIt's just a simple counter - every time someone visits it counts one. Also tells me where visitors are from. Why refresh the page? And you visited 37 times in the last half hour? Awww.. thanks Tim.
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