Fruit Insurance

with consumer champion Linda Pound

We've all experienced the trauma of buying fresh fruit, finding that it's all firm and luscious while it's in the shop, but has turned mushy by the time you get it home. There's nothing worse than unpacking your shopping and finding that your plumbs are all squished and your mango's gone brown. Actually, there are probably one or two things that are worse. Dental work, that's usually quite unpleasant. Nobody enjoys dental work, do they? Nobody normal, anyway. Yes, so I think that I may have overstated the case with the fruit situation.

Anyhow, the thing is that suddenly finding that you have a bowl full of rotten fruit can be quite irritating, and the worse thing is that fruit seems to decay quite unpredictably. One minute your peaches are all firm and taught, and the next, without warning, they're reduced to sagging orbs, seeping sticky fluid. You may have a bag full of zesty little oranges, each bursting with vitamin c - but then one will randomly decide to develop a powdery green overcoat, and that's really annoying.

Not as annoying as stubbing your toe on an item of furniture, of course. Again, I'm anxious not to oversell the whole fruit thing. Stubbing your toe is a really, really bad thing, and not much fun. At least if your orange goes green you can just throw it away, whereas if your toe goes black, you're kind of stuck with it.

So anyway, back to the fruit, which we've agreed is mildly irritating and slightly annoying when it goes off, but not in a serious or overly dramatic way. Well, the answer to all your problems is now here, in the form of specialist fruit insurance. A fruit insurance policy can compensate you if your banana goes black or your strawberries get furry, and as long as you have handled your fruit correctly you will be fully reimbursed. Many companies are now offering fruit insurance, but remember that it pays to shop around and make sure you read the small print.

Actually, I just realised I may have misled you in that last paragraph. When I said that it was 'the answer to all your problems' obviously I didn't mean that literally. Fruit insurance is good, but it can't fix everything that has ever gone wrong in your life. I mean, if you've got a paper cut, or you've missed a bus, or you can't get a phone signal, it's not going to fix all that. And of course, those things can be really quite irritating, perhaps more so than the whole fruit thing, so, you know...