Mark my words: It’s not what you say but the way that you say it

He said he preferred tinned salmon to fresh salmon because he came from an impoverished widow’s family in pre-war Leeds, where the height of posh tastiness was tinned salmon.

The first time I read the comment, I realised I had — and still have — the attitude to peaches he had to salmon. I love tinned peaches. I’m not pushed about the hairy real thing, even though there was a period in literature when characters who were about to have sex in a field tended to have lunch first and it nearly always consisted of brie, wine, French bread, and fresh peaches.

I couldn’t count the number of fictional characters who seduced each other through the display of peach juice dribbling down their faces. I never quite understood how someone would find someone else’s peach dribble to be seductive, but maybe that’s because I never got a chance at the whole sex-in-a-field thing either.