Apples

I love fuji apples. They even have a 'season', which implies an 'off-season', a time of year during which they are not available. Just the thing to teach humans patience, I say.

This morning we visited Tesco, I'm afraid our boycott of Tesco was short-lived. You see, Tesco receives one out of every eight retail pounds spent by Joe UK-Consumer. So, it only made sense to shop elsewhere, support the little guy, so to speak. For awhile, we did this, but... there's always a 'but' in these cases, can you dig it, man, Tesco is on the way home from York, plus they have my fave Fentimanns. I always hope Morrisons will decide to sell more Fentimanns, they only sell the Ginger Beer variety, no Curiousity Cola, no Dandelion & Burdock. So I go to Tesco, they stock all varieties.

It's not like I didn't give Morrisons a fair chance in this regard... I even went so far as to interrogate a clerk at Morrisons, busy in his task of stocking your Cokes, your Pepsis, and so on, I said: "excuse me, you stock Fentimanns Ginger Beer, but not any of the other varieties, you see, there's Curiosity Cola blah blah blah blah", and he said, "no, we don't stock those", and I said, "well, do you think you might, in future?", and he said, "No. No, I don't think so". A bit shattering, to a sensitive spirit such as myself.

But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about fuji apples.

I bought fuji apples at Tesco this morning; in previous visits to Tesco, it never seemed like their fujis were anything special, not the high quality I've come to expect from Morrisons, but, today, they looked very nice. I bought four. Maybe five.

Now, skip forward in your mind, forward in time, into the future of those fujis, to a time when they arrive at my house. You all know the ritual...

1. You bring the groceries into the house
2. You remove the groceries from their paperorplastic (although we use, and re-use, our cotton fabric M&S bags, but don't let that deviation confuse you) (I don't really know if they are made of cotton or not. Maybe later I'll see if I can figure it out)
3. You put the groceries in pre-organised bins, as if they were just so many different Lego shapes

It was in the neighbourhood of step #2 where it all went horribly wrong. The plastic bag containing the fugi apples broke, the bottom of it splitting open. Disaster! We have hardwood floors, and each fuji apple dropped from a height of approx one metre. If memory serves:

v(final)=sq. rt. (2gh)

Where g is 10 metres per second squared, and h is, in this case, unity. So, v=2root5, or ~4.47 m/s. The kineteic energy of each apple would then be (1/2) m(v squared); if the mass of each apple is 200 grams ( 5 per kilogram? is that right?), then the kinetic energy of each apple is about 2 joules. All lost on that hardwood floor.

Or, more accurately, that energy was deposited into each apple...

Bruising was inevitable!

So. New Year's Eve lunch was a cinch- fuji apples. All of them. All of them, immediately.

Now I'm hungry again.