Spinning out

Except that my days of easing seized bolts are long gone. I can still tidy up a bit of sloppy writing though – a complaint, an invitation, a letter to the council. I have even been known to sex up the odd flyer.

So when Doreen, a greengrocer friend, asked me to look at some promotional blurb for father’s day, I was happy to oblige. ‘We are going to donate £2 to a prostate cancer charity for every basket of fruit we sell that week,’ she explained. And they say philanthropy is dead.

‘Because prostate cancer is a man’s thing, and dads are mostly men?’ I asked, just to be sure. Spot on. ‘And because eating fruit helps fend off cancer?’ Exactly.

I was tempted to add: ‘And because you have some produce to shift?’ But instead, I just asked Doreen to sketch out her thoughts and