A few words from Rob Mansfield

OK, so the picture on the left is pretty crap, but I think you can tell what I’m getting at.

Why is it that every single individual piece of fruit now has to have its own special sticker? We’re not talking the branding ones like ‘Cape’ or ‘Zespri’, just the ones with number and name.

I know it’s to help staff differentiate between varieties of fruit, but does every single piece need its own identifier? Think of the manpower, adhesive and paper being wasted just to put it on.

It must be like being in The Prisoner in the apple section of Sainsbury’s. There’s probably one lonely Braeburn desperate to break free of the plastic bag and scream, “I am not a number, I’m an apple!”

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I’m a dad. And, in case you’re new to this blog, I should add I have two children - two beautiful daughters.

The oldest is now 5 and yet, I still don’t feel like a proper parent. I often take my children out on my own and am convinced that other people are looking at me and saying to themselves: ‘He doesn’t look like a proper father!’ or ‘What on earth is he doing with that child?’

You see, I still live in a haze of paranoia that someone will come up to me and say, you’re not doing it properly and are a crap dad. Here’s a black mark against you - one more and your child will hate you for life.

It doesn’t how many times I tell myself or C that you only need to be ‘good enough’, it still doesn’t really sink in.

All it needs is for my youngest not to come to the front door and greet me when I come home from work and I assume I’ve done something wrong and she doesn’t like me any more.

Or else I call up B to ask her how her day at school was and she refuses to talk to me, because she’s watching TV instead.

I keep pointing out to myself that I was probably exactly the same (and probably still am) with my Mum and Dad and that’s just the way of the world. In other words, you never truly appreciate what’s been done for you, until it’s almost too late.

I hope that one day I’ll wake up and have that Eureka moment when I realise that actually I’m doing an OK job and that people don’t judge me at every step, but I’m not holding out any hope just yet.

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As the Olympics draws to a close, this is possibly my favourite related piece of trivia.

One of the US athletics team, making her debut at the Olympics was a 400m hurdler called Queen Harrison. In fact, her full name is Queen Quedith Earth Harrison.

Now the emergence of off names in America has been catalogued many times before, I have no doubt. But Queen’s family is pretty impressive, even by these standards.

She has 8 direct brothers and sisters and another 14 half-siblings from her dad’s previous relationships. Her brothers and sisters have names such as Victory, Muun, Empress and Kingmaster.

My personal favourite, however, is her brother, whose name is: God Goldin Zig Zag Zig Allah Harrison.

I’m not sure there’s any need to say anything else.

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