MY LIFE AS A POTATO

It’s not particularly easy to go through life with a face that resembles a potato. Oh, I’ll grant you, there are so many who have a much more difficult time of it than someone who is merely a bit potatoish in appearance, but, sometimes, it’s the more subtle problems which people tolerate and suffer that are the most ignored by society as it rattles along in its self-absorbed way.

For instance, my father was deaf. Not profoundly so, but deaf nevertheless. He acquired his hearing aid in an analogue era and it needed a constant supply of those early circular zinc batteries to keep it chugging along, and it was one of those early discreet “behind the ear” versions that relaced the old box and wire versions in the early days of miniaturisation. This was strangely problematical because those chunky, more “visible” versions did at least mean that people knew that you were deaf. Sometimes his device did start to emit the most piercing of electronic shrieks in public places and he would be totally unaware that it was doing do. Equally, the omnidirectional nature of the thing meant that, if we were having a meal in a restaurant, for example, he could hear quite clearly what was being said on all the tables around us but be completely unable to hear what the people he was eating with were saying.

Because there is seldom an obvious visual element to deafness, apart perhaps from a more intense stare, quite often people would just assume he was a bit “simple” when they had to repeat things to him over and over again with increasing slowness and corresponding increases in volume. I still remember him being very fond of the campaign slogan “Deaf  not daft!” which he seemed to find a comfort. On his bleaker days my father would say that he sometimes wished that he was blind rather than deaf so that people wouldn’t just assume he was some kind of an idiot.

Personally, I don’t find that a particularly convincing argument, but it does make for an interesting discussion point. If it had to be one or the other, which would you choose? My life involves so many things that are visual, reading (and – sort of - writing) words, artwork, photography and so on, that I can still only think of blindness as the worse of the two curses, but I imagine if you were more passionate about music than I am you might think otherwise.

Hopefully I will never be struck down with either, but it is something to think about.

Meanwhile, I do wish I had been blessed with less resemblance to a potato. In the great scheme of things, it’s hardly the worst thing to be cursed with and in the end it didn’t really matter when it came to my ultimate personal happiness, and I also know that I should be spending this time counting my blessings instead of dwelling upon something which boils down (Ho, ho!) to basic vanity, but it has been something that I suspect has held me back as I have moved my own sorry way through this sad vale of tears.

It certainly never meant that I stood out from the crowd, and there was always someone with better bone structure, better hair and a more self-confident air to attract the attention of the girls as we all plunged into the boiling cauldron of teenagerdom, and even today, I think that the general air of prejudice towards the “beautiful people” and away from we ordinary spuds still goes on when it comes to getting good service in restaurants or supermarkets, or even more life-changing matters like job-seeking. It’s not as if the humble potato is even the most interesting of the vegetables, it’s just something that’s always there, something you can depend on, “Good old reliable spud”, but it doesn’t come with an air of adventure. Granted it can be served up in a variety of ways and provide a bit of entertainment, and you know that people might very well be off having lots of fun with all the other choices, but in the end, it’s the potato that they want to come home to. A nice bowl of mash or a portion of chips was always comfort food to a great many, and, if that is far too much trouble, then there’s always a bag of crisps in the cupboard if you get a little peckish and want an easy snack that takes no real effort. Perhaps that’s the other reason why I related to the humble potato so much, spending all those sad, sorry, lonely years trying to be amusing or interesting but seldom actually exciting or stimulating, but knowing that when it all went horribly wrong it would be me that would have to listen to all the tales of woe and then be ignored again when another tempting piece of asparagus next came along.

After all, it was always “Spud-u-like”, and never “Spud-u-love” wasn’t it…?

As I’ve got older and the face has filled out and the hair begins its inexorable slow departure for the realms of memory, the resemblance has become ever more palpable. In recent years, as the body has aged, the analogy has increased as odd tubers have taken to surfacing through the skin in various places upon my head, although thankfully they are generally still currently hidden by hair, and, of course, at least still having the ability to grow hair has meant that I could stave off the full-blown potato countenance for longer than I thought possible.

Of course when I was younger I was more convinced that the most striking resemblance I had was to a toad. I once drew a huge self-portrait with my face replaced by that of a toad and found very few people actually disagreeing with the observation. Perhaps I spent more mornings looking a bit greener around the gills in those days, although, as my experiences with handling actual potato-like foodstuffs for cooking purposes in those studenty days were of the tinned or powdered variety, it is unlikely that I knew much about green potatoes back then, otherwise I may have made the more familiar connection a lot earlier.

Interestingly, the only “real” potatoes I ever seemed to see in those years were from my friend’s rather bizarre cost-saving three-week food cycle. This involved going to the market and the weekly purchase of about four potatoes costing around 10p, and then the choice of either Cornish pasties, faggots or fish cakes as part of a “4 for £1” offer on one of the stalls. The more astute of you will have already noticed a three day shortfall in the number of meals that provided in relation to the number of the days of the week, but the solution to that particular problem remains a mystery, although he did have a rather wonderful girlfriend who, I imagine, took pity on him over the weekend and fed him tasty treats. I’ve never really thought about this before, but I wonder what vegetable sprang to mind when he walked into her life…

You can guarantee it wasn’t the humble spud, that’s for sure…