Joshua Goodwin

Some time ago, printed inside the magazine that falls out of the newspaper on Saturdays, there was a brief, light-hearted sort of interview with a man named Alan Titchmarsh. It’s not the kind of thing that I make a habit of poring over, I promise, but one particular statement managed to catch my eye as I flapped past, and has haunted me ever since:

I only ever use shampoo in the shower – I don’t use soap. I shampoo my hair and then spread it all over. It keeps my skin soft.

Now, I’m happy to admit that I don’t really know what an Alan Titchmarsh is. He is some kind of broadcaster, I think – something to do with gardening – and, not uniquely among such people, he does books. Maybe he’s a twit, but that’s probably quite an unfair allegation, since I don’t know him or anything. I did once have to look inside one of his books about gardening – I think I was looking for a picture of a snail, so that I could make a candelabra, which is a very completely normal thing to do – and it seemed a bit nasty that he was advising readers about how to kill “common pests”. Alan Titchmarsh would be a bit annoyed if a snail was trying to kill Alan Titchmarsh.

However, since reading that article I have been influenced by the snail murderer. Whenever I wash the hair that is on top of my head, I use any excess shampoo to clean other areas. I am rarely so overgenerous with the shampoo that I may avoid supplementing it with proper soap, and I don’t use shampoo when I’m not washing my hair, but it is a wholly sensible technique that I employ whenever I have squeezed out too much shampoo (quite often). There are clumps of hair growth in secret places that aren’t my head, so it’s probably quite appropriate to use shampoo there.

But Titchmarsh claims to be considerably more extreme: shampoo is the only form of soap that he ever uses in the shower, ever. As keen anoraks will point out, he seems to suggest (incorrectly) that shampoo doesn’t count as soap (it does), but we get the idea nonetheless.

The quotation implies that he washes his hair every time he has a shower, which seems a bit much becuase he doesn’t have particularly long hair – perhaps he adapts by reducing how often he does a shower, or by sometimes doing a bath. I wonder whether by now, nearly two whole years after the article was published, he has become more moderate.

Does it really keep skin soft? What evidence is there to back this up? Who the hell does Alan Titchmarsh think he is, making these bold statements? He isn’t some kind of expert. Even if it is true, how beneficial is soft skin? Snails often have soft skin, so it seems a bit messed up that Alan Titchmarsh is trying to emulate what he himself – or possibly his ghostwriter! – has described as “common pests”. I am reminded of those anti-ageing sorbets, that claim to produce glowing skin, which would be a bit unsettling if the claims were true.

If shampoo really is the most effective soap, how come this isn’t bandied around more by the soap companies? Does Alan Titchmarsh think he is a consumer champion – does shampoo end up being more cost-effective for the end user? Is soap really more profitable than shampoo for Mr Palmolive and his colleagues? Shampoo tends to be packaged in thick plastic bottles, while soap can make do with a thin layer paper – so Alan Titchmarsh is encouraging a lifestyle that is damaging to the environment.

I have mulled it over and the only possible conclusion is that Alan Titchmarsh is spreading lies so that he can start selling shampoo made out of snails, and everybody will buy lots of it, convinced it will make them have better skin, having read a small article that was published in a newspaper in December 2008. He will be rich enough to live in a bath of shampoo, leaving a slimy trail wherever he goes, like the snail he has always wanted to be. He is jealous of their relaxed, oozy lifestyles – that is why he seeks revenge. He must be stopped.

I hope Alan Titchmarsh is shivering, now that I have exposed his evil ways. I looked at his website – I shall not link to it, because a potentially dangerous man does not deserve Google juice – and noticed that, irresponsibly, he has put a picture of his signature at the top of every page. (He is even less responsible than Mr Picasso, because at least those cars cost money, and are fitted with car alarms should anyone approach with tracing paper.) He doesn’t seem very clever, which is fortunate – his plan seems unlikely to ever succeed. Very few people read those brief, light-hearted sort of interviews in that magazine. What was he thinking?

Would now be a good time to address another exciting soap development? I hope so. Mr Dettol has invented a battery-powered soap dispenser that magically detects approaching hands and squirts soap onto them without requiring any harmful touching of the dispenser that would smear the hands with evil germs who would presumably be biffed by the soap anyhow.

When it was still topical, Richard and Judy from off of the television did a very effective attack that was printed inside an otherwise irritating newspaper called the Daily Express. I wonder how they managed to write a single article, despite the challenge of two different people – I do hope they took turns to write one word each. A degree of confusion is apparent, as they dart back and forth from “we” to “I”, but even so they managed to do a good job. That’s how easy it is to see the ludicrousness.

The Dettol advertising makes me feel slightly sick. A beastly disembodied lady’s voice, saying things about bacteria that probably aren’t true, so that paranoid viewers will dash to smother Mr Dettol’s pockets. If it were really effective, I would really be sick and have to use some of their disinfectant to clean it up, but that doesn’t happen. They didn’t think of that.

(It seems to me that they can’t be particularly keen to help us not catch diseases, because their disinfectant business is a bit reliant on people doing vomits. Of course, the obsessive cleanliness pandered to by their soap apparently makes immune systems wimpier, so Mr Dettol wins lots of different things. It is nasty, serious stuff, a bit depressing. Sorry.)

On the Friday before this one, I did what is called a cliffhanger, sort of promising to do a sequel to that day’s post, a sequel in which I would reveal what was written on the sticker that had been glued to the skin of a satsuma that I had eaten, apart from the word “satsuma” in white uppercase letters on a dark blue background.

You’ll be glad to know that I keep my promises, and to that end I am about to do the big revelation. There were hints that I might have done it on Tuesday, and I jolly well did try – I was feverishly typing at midnight and everything – but in the end it is fortunate that I’d had the foresight to use the word “perhaps”. Still, it is less worse to be late than it is to be very late, I think.

Now, to business. The label is ovoidial, with two axes of symmetry. Below the word “satsuma” is a hash symbol, immediately followed by – in marginally bigger type than everything else – the number 3029. The typeface seems to be Friz Quadrata. Encircling the text, parallel to the perimeter of the label, is a thin white line.

What is the relevance of the hash? It is nothing to do with the things off of Twitter. It is not a handy pre-drawn noughts and crosses grid, being far too small, and having far too dark a background, for that. It is neither beef nor cannabis. In fact, what is relevant is that in Canada the hash is known as the “number sign”. Great, but what is the relevance of the number?

Oh look, it is a “PLU code”. A website exists, into which such codes can be entered to identify the corresponding fruit. It sounds useless – my satsuma was obviously a satsuma, given that the label said “satsuma” on it and everything – but that point of view is short-sighted. Organicness and genetic modification are less instantly discernible, for instance. (My satsuma was not organic, which is a shame, because I quite like organs.)

It is comforting to know that, just as we can put people on the moon, we have a sophisticated system for identifying fruitses. Or maybe it isn’t, maybe it is wrong that so much time has been invested into classifying produce, when there are far more pertinent problems to be solved. I don’t know.

That website is named Fruit Sticker. Another website exists, named Fruit Labels. (They are confusingly similar names, and I hate it when that occurs in books, but this time it is not my fault.)

Fruit Labels is a section of the website of Roger Harris. If Fruit Sticker seems a bit close to pointlessness, Fruit Labels takes that to a bit of a new level – and I think I prefer it for that reason.

Harris is a fruxafixographologist, a collector of fruit labels (he does other things as well). His site – over a decade old, and (a bit unsurprisingly) claiming to be the first of its kind – boasts over 1000 images of different stickers from off of fruits (and some vegetables).

Has Harris been wasting (a probably quite small portion of) his life? I don’t think so. I’m sure it has been very fruitful, ha ha ha.

No, seriously, it’s a bit interesting to see the changing designs of the stickers over time and stuff. More and more often, fruit firms’ website addresses are included, for instance, and perhaps there are other design trends to pick out. Most of all, a lot of the labels just look rather nice – the designers have coped well with the constraints of often sub-postage stamp dimensions. I don’t know whether a fruit label can be much of a bellwether for the wider world, a social history, but that’s OK.

(One interesting is that that in November 2000, certain Granny Smith labels featured an Ask.com marketing wheeze. On-sticker advertising has never really taken off, though, which is perhaps a bit of a relief.)

The site’s introduction is worth reading. I might have liked to do some observations about the label on fruit here, but Roger Harris has done it very well already, so it would be pointless. There is some surprising stuff in there, engagingly written. Read it. I suppose I am a bit jealous, because I shall have to write about something else. Sorry. (It is probably a relief.)

It could be tempting to jump onto the bandwagon. My satsuma label has gone in the bin, but quite by accident I am still in the vicinity of three different fruit labels, none of which have twins in that collection. I could send them in, but that’s actually unlikely. What isn’t unlikely, and is in fact likely, is that they’ll remain glued to an empty marmalade jar. That is the normal thing. Roger Harris, however, had the balls to do something exceptional, to do more with his fruit labels than just festoon the old house of a former breakfast, and I applaud him for that.

Look, a satsuma! I know that it’s one of those, rather than a tangerine or a clementine, because there is a label on the satsuma, and “satsuma” is written on the label, in white uppercase letters on a dark blue background.

I ought to confess that the exciting bit of the satsuma is actually inside my tummy. Just the skin and its attached label remain. This has been the case for quite some time, and in fact by now the flesh has probably been digested and then farted out and things. The skin is by now fairly shrivelled, but maybe not quite as universally shrivelled as it should really be after all this time – I am disappointed.

Don’t get any ideas – I by no means make a habit of leaving satsuma skins on my desk. (That’s why the slow rate of shrivelling was a surprise. How could I know what to expect?) This could explain why I am compelled to mention it now. It is a novelty, and so this is not a fascinating insight into my daily life. I might start to make a habit of it, though, because as it sat there, day after day, it sort of nagged me to disturb this blog. (I have decided to take a leaf out of King’s Lynn’s Lynn News newspaper’s book, by publishing something every Tuesday and Friday – I promise.)

The satsuma, I think, was quite nice – not that I can really remember. Often, a balance of depth of flavour and ease of peeling can be pretty elusive, but this was not a problem here either. I pride myself on being able to peel fruit so that the skin stays in one piece, and this was no exception. I shall never be one of those people who shred the peel into hundreds of little pieces. However, while a connoisseur’s peelings can often be rearranged to give the illusion of a full orange, the shrivelling has ruled that out here.

The white stuff that’s neither the flesh nor the skin of an orange is known as the “pith”. If a person has a lisp, there can be a bit of confusion, but it feels like an appropriate word, until you come across the (quite horrible) adjective “pithy”. (Further lisp confusion potential here, although without the possibility of the idea being that the juice looks a bit like wee.)

Now, I sometimes eat the pith, when I’m a bit desperate, and my bowels probably rejoice when that happens, but it’s not the main attraction, and it never seems wasteful to fling it straight at the compost heap. An overly pithy orange is a bit annoying. When boredom strikes, it is fun to (quite unnecessarily) remove the pith, out of respect to the orange, in case it improves the experience, and the time that takes can be inconveniently close to forever. Although the pith is arguably a good, wholesome thing, often useful for innovatively mopping up juices (you should try it), it’s not really related to terse cogency, is it?

(Was it Mo Mowlam or Ann Widdecombe who appeared on Ready, Steady, Cook! some time ago and grated well beyond the zest of a lemon or maybe an orange? What an idiot!)

The label of the satsuma doesn’t just contain the word “satsuma”, of course – they rarely do. But rather than saying any more now, I shall cunningly shut up and return to this subject another time. (On Tuesday, perhaps?)