It’s like something out of That’s Life – a 1973-1994 BBC Television magazine-style consumer affairs and entertainment programme presented by Esther Rantzen and a panel of male co-presenters. During its Sunday evening run in the mid nineteen-seventies it made for a relaxing and usually mindless end to the weekend. Among the serious and often worthwhile consumer rights campaigns, the show contained numerous items that were just plain silly: there were “Odd Odes”; stooges would burst into song in supermarkets; there was a dog that could growl the word “sausages”; and viewers would send in unusually shaped vegetables such as intertwined carrots, teddy-bear shaped potatoes and parsnips that looked like legs with male genitalia.
Well here Esther, around forty years too late, is my contribution – a courgette that looks like a duck. Pareidolia.
It was hiding in the vegetable patch. It must have twisted round to grow against its stalk. Concealed beneath the leaves at the back of the plant, it surreptitiously became this three and three-quarter pound (1700g) monster.
