Peeling Potatoes Episode 61: Cinderella, Dom Pérignon and Where Ideas Wander

A Fruitloop University Thingy, created by Fruitloop and made weirder by The Mayor.

Fairy tales with software problems, a dragon with a defective toaster, Dom Pérignon at the customer-service desk, and Fruitloop asking the sort of questions that make a perfectly serviceable brain wander off without permission.

Fruitloop had warm South African winter weather. I had my trusty coffee.

That is normally enough infrastructure to begin Peeling Potatoes.

The subject was unexpected ideas, although Fruitloop had clearly decided that merely talking about unexpected ideas would be far too straightforward. Instead, she had prepared something.

This is rarely good news.

“Before we start with this whole process…” she began.

“Process,” I said. “Oh, that’s a Cheerio word if ever I heard one.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, please.”

And we were off.

Fruitloop wanted the first fairy tale that came into my head.

“Hansel and Gretel.”

Excellent.

Now, she said, rewrite it. Give it a different ending. Add an unexpected twist.

Fair enough. There was only one small obstacle.

I could not remember Hansel and Gretel.

“So it was…the young girl goes into the gingerbread house and finds that her grandmother has been eaten by a wolf, and the wolf wants to eat Gretel. Is that the story?”

“No, no, no,” Fruitloop said. “That is Little Red Riding Hood.”

Ah.

“How to embarrass myself in full public.”

Fruitloop was not exactly in a position to become Professor of Fairy Tales herself. Between us we had a forest, breadcrumbs, a gingerbread house, possibly a witch, possibly an angry grandmother and somebody, somewhere, wanting to turn children into pies.

“Or an angry grandmother, I don’t know,” Fruitloop said.

“Is there a difference?”

Apparently there is.

Some of her memories came from stories she had watched with her son. Some of mine had probably been contaminated by Disney. Neither of us could remember which bit belonged to which fairy tale with sufficient confidence to pass even a very relaxed examination.

We did what all serious researchers do when the evidence becomes inconvenient.

We changed fairy tales.

Little Red Riding Hood seemed safer.

Wolf. Granny. Large teeth.

We could work with this.

Except that when we reached the rescue, neither of us could immediately remember the man who appears at the end.

Eventually we found him.

The woodsman.

“What about Granny?” I asked.

“She must have been in there.”

Which left me with the rather wonderful picture of Little Red Riding Hood finding her grandmother inside the wolf.

“Fancy meeting you here, Granny.”

At this point I felt we had already achieved quite enough.

Fruitloop informed me that this was only the warm-up.

Of course it was.

Welcome to FLU.

Fruitloop has created what she calls Fruitloop University.

I have shortened this to FLU, which is perhaps an unfortunate acronym for an educational establishment, but rather appropriate because her questions are highly contagious and frequently leave me confused, feverish and in need of a lie-down.

At FLU there are no sensible qualifications.

There is no recognised curriculum.

And, as far as I can tell, I am both the student and the laboratory rat.

For this particular session, Fruitloop had placed me behind the customer-service desk. My customers would be famous fairy-tale characters whose traditional problems had somehow become entangled with modern technology.

“You’re playing with fire here.”

“I know.”

She did.

First through the door was Cinderella.

Cinderella had missed the royal ball because her smart carriage had become stuck in a four-hour mandatory software update.

In the driveway.

Now this is the problem with modernising fairy tales. In the old days, the pumpkin became a carriage, the mice became horses and everybody worried about midnight.

Today, Cinderella would still be outside at quarter past eleven staring at a screen saying:

Updating. 37%. Please do not switch off your carriage.

Fruitloop wanted me to solve the problem.

I immediately saw two possible approaches.

“I can give you a logical answer, and we’ll be done in about ten minutes. Or I can create a dual fantasy story around it, and we’ll be here until tomorrow morning.”

Fruitloop chose badly.

So I went to work.

I spent thirteen years in five-star hotels. There is a certain mentality that comes with that. If a guest wants a pink elephant, your first response is not supposed to be, “I’m sorry, madam, pink elephants are surprisingly difficult to source at this hour.”

You find the bloody elephant.

“Somewhere in my weird, wacky brain, we will find a solution for poor Cinderella.”

And we did.

My first decision was to stop the clocks.

Not metaphorically.

Actually stop them.

“Time stands still.”

If time has stopped, Cinderella cannot be late. This seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

She would obviously be distressed by the whole software-update business, so we needed to calm her down while we arranged alternative transport.

Fruitloop University — sorry, FLU — apparently has money coming out of its ears, so I saw no reason to offer Cinderella something miserable from a customer-service coffee machine.

Dom Pérignon.

Possibly Château d’Yquem.

Maybe Pétrus.

The drinks list began to become more complicated than the transportation problem.

“The woman needs a drink.”

Fruitloop accepted that.

“And she has her standards. So we have to meet them.”

Once Cinderella had composed herself, powdered her nose and recovered from the trauma of software version 14.6, I would retrieve the broom I kept behind the customer-service desk.

For cleaning purposes, naturally.

Except this was FLU.

So it was a magic broom.

No petrol.

Carbon neutral.

Very 2026.

And because I have standards, Cinderella was not expected to spend the journey balancing on an uncomfortable broom handle with a bottle of Dom Pérignon between her knees.

There would be a proper seat.

A comfortable little corner.

Possibly another glass.

Fruitloop listened to this increasingly elaborate transport plan and then quietly slipped the knife in.

“No wonder she lost her shoe.”

That is one of Fruitloop’s talents.

I can spend five minutes constructing an entire alternative universe and she can puncture it with six words.

Still, one matter remained.

Cinderella needed to tell the prince she would be late.

Fruitloop asked me to compose the message.

I slipped naturally into my customer-service role.

“Dearest darling Prince.”

“Oh, wow.”

“I am currently in my evening toilette…”

There had been a perfume problem. The wrong perfume had been delivered. The champagne was warm. There were standards to maintain.

Cinderella would therefore be arriving a little later than planned.

“But I want you to see the perfect version of me. The ugly part can come later when we’re married.”

Fruitloop approved.

Customer number one dealt with.

FLU remained open.

The Big Bad Wolf Discovers Uber Eats.

Next came the Big Bad Wolf.

This surprised me because I thought we had already killed him.

“As you do,” I said. “Must be Buddhist reincarnation.”

Fruitloop explained that the Big Bad Wolf had finally realised that all the huffing and puffing and blowing houses down was terrible for his asthma.

He had moved with the times.

He now used Uber Eats.

Unfortunately, Grandma’s house was difficult to find on GPS.

So he had left a one-star review.

Fruitloop wanted me to write a diplomatic response.

I felt we first needed to examine the wolf’s own contribution to the problem.

Here was a creature who had been famous for hundreds of years. Everybody knew him. Children knew him. Grandmothers knew him. Woodsmen certainly knew him.

Yet he apparently wanted a private life in the middle of the forest where nobody could find him.

No paparazzi.

No police.

No government officials.

No taxman.

All perfectly understandable.

But then he expected the Uber Eats driver to arrive at the front door with dinner still hot.

“You see, the Big Bad Wolf wants to have his cake and eat it.”

Or perhaps his kid and eat it.

Fruitloop suggested pork knuckle.

I stopped.

“That’s a good idea. I’ve got a lot of food ideas at the moment. I need to write pork knuckle down.”

This is what happens at FLU.

One minute I am responsible for reputation management on behalf of an internationally recognised wolf. The next I am planning dinner.

But somewhere in all this nonsense there was a genuine point.

The wolf had left a one-star review because his expectations had not been met. Fair enough. That is often where bad reviews begin.

But I remembered a hotel locally that had suffered dreadful service problems. Customers complained, and quite rightly. The service really had been poor.

What the customers did not necessarily see was the other side: the owner was struggling desperately to find people to work.

That did not magically make the bad service good.

But it did make the story more complicated.

“A lot of these one-star reviews are born out of frustration because expectations weren’t met. But there are always two sides to a story.”

And there it was.

Nobody had gone looking for that thought.

We had started with an asthmatic wolf who could not get his Uber Eats delivered.

That is the bit I like.

Peeling Potatoes does not normally march towards profundity wearing sensible shoes. It trips over it somewhere near the pork knuckle.

Fruitloop then dragged me back to the important matter of branding the wolf’s new delivery service.

I suggested:

“Buy now, pay now. We’ll deliver as quick as possible. You’re going to die anyway.”

Fruitloop felt that might be slightly long for the side of a van.

Eventually I came up with Poisonous Pleasures, inspired by the old expression, “What’s your poison?”

“It doesn’t sound like a food delivery service,” she said. “Maybe some other deliveries.”

“No, no, no, no, no. Hear me out.”

She did.

Poor woman.

Rapunzel Gets Fibre.

“Number three,” Fruitloop announced. “I’m excited about this. I don’t know how it’s going to go.”

This is not a sentence that fills me with confidence at FLU.

The next customer was Rapunzel.

“She was the one with the long hair, wasn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“And the hundred years’ sleep?”

“No, no, no, no. That was Sleeping Beauty.”

Still no fairy-tale diploma for me.

Fruitloop explained that Rapunzel had finally realised that allowing princes to climb up her hair was a health-and-safety nightmare.

Sensibly, she had installed high-speed fibre in the tower.

She had then become a hair-care influencer on TikTok with five million followers.

Only five million, I thought, but never mind.

The problem was the trolls.

Sparkle the Unicorn — another distinguished member of the FLU universe — had given Rapunzel some very mature advice.

Ignore them.

I agreed.

For several seconds.

Then my brain went somewhere else.

Why not reward the trolls with a free sample of Rapunzel’s revolutionary new hair product?

Wonderful idea.

They would be thrilled.

Except the product might encourage vigorous hair growth in certain parts of the body where hair was not necessarily desirable.

Fruitloop attempted to keep this discussion around the lower-leg area.

I was not always cooperative.

And then she produced a real story which was better than anything I could invent.

A few mornings earlier, she had heard a radio programme in which a younger presenter challenged an older male presenter to have his back waxed live on air.

They applied the wax.

Put on the strips.

And pulled.

“That poor man.”

“He’s crazy.”

Apparently he screamed magnificently.

The radio team then edited the screams into an AC/DC song.

Now that is broadcasting.

And once again, in the middle of all this nonsense, another thought arrived.

We men can have plenty of opinions about how women should look without spending much time considering what women actually go through to satisfy some of those expectations.

Waxing is a reasonably good example.

“So it’s actually good that men sometimes get a taste of their own medicine.”

“Yes,” Fruitloop said. “Go through the experience.”

Exactly.

Go through the experience.

I briefly imagined arriving home and announcing that I needed to wax my legs.

I was less certain how that particular experiment would be received.

But we live and we learn.

Preferably at somebody else’s expense.

Ignis Is Having a Bad Day.

Fruitloop had saved Ignis the dragon until last.

We already knew Ignis.

This time he had ordered a custom toaster oven online.

It arrived broken.

In the old days, a disappointed dragon would simply have incinerated the village.

Ignis had adapted to modern life.

He wrote a Google review.

One star.

“Zero stars if I could.”

Fruitloop read it to me.

Ignis had ordered the Ultra Crisp Deluxe because, in his words, he refused to breathe fire on his daily Pop-Tarts “like a barbarian”.

The heating element was dead.

His ancestors, he explained, would have incinerated corporate headquarters, melted the customer-service department and hoarded the company’s gold.

Instead, he was reduced to furiously typing on a tiny smartphone while eating a cold frozen waffle.

He threatened Reddit.

He threatened Twitter.

He threatened TikTok.

He threatened the CEO’s share price.

And finally he placed a curse upon them:

“May your bread forever be soggy.”

I listened to the whole thing.

“Well, that wasn’t Donald Trump who wrote that on Truth Social.”

Fruitloop wanted me to make the review more constructive.

“God, he was having a bad day, wasn’t he?”

He was.

And, annoyingly, I recognised something of myself in the dragon.

Not the fire-breathing.

Usually.

The writing.

“You can go into too much detail, and you can actually write too much, and you can overthink.”

“Especially when you’re angry,” Fruitloop said.

Quite.

When you are furious, every additional sentence feels essential.

It rarely is.

My revised version was shorter.

The product does not work.

I am extremely pissed off.

Please replace it.

Possibly add a restrained warning that the Big Bad Wolf may otherwise come round and blow the building down.

Fruitloop pointed out that Ignis was now outsourcing his violence.

A modern executive.

Eventually I reached the useful bit.

“You can still be pissed off. It’s how you phrase it.”

That, I think, is true.

You do not have to pretend something is fine when it is not.

You can be angry.

You can complain.

You can say the product is rubbish.

But perhaps you do not need to destroy the company’s share price, melt the customer-service department and condemn humanity to eternally soggy toast before giving somebody an opportunity to put it right.

Quite sensible.

Which worried me.

FLU was starting to look almost educational.

Five Out of Five What?

Fruitloop had one final challenge.

The traditional five-star rating system was boring.

She wanted me to replace it.

I went quiet.

One star became one gummy bear.

Two stars: marshmallows.

Three: a slab of gingerbread house.

Four: chocolate ice cream with sprinkles.

And five?

Chocolate and vanilla ice cream with sprinkles floating in Dom Pérignon.

Fruitloop looked at me.

“That was unexpected.”

She had expected potatoes.

Perhaps pineapples.

Five out of five potatoes would certainly have been more on-brand.

But that would have been the obvious answer.

And I had finally noticed what Fruitloop had been doing to me for the previous hour.

She throws something strange onto the table and then waits.

I look for the system.

I look for the logic.

I try to work out the rules.

Then, if she is lucky, my brain performs one of its peculiar somersaults and wanders off somewhere neither of us expected.

Sometimes this is deeply inconvenient.

There are plenty of moments in real life when the answer is sitting directly in front of me and I cannot see it because I have already constructed seventeen alternatives, a spreadsheet, three contingency plans and a magic broom with a drinks cabinet.

But at FLU, that tendency becomes useful.

The sensible answer to Cinderella’s problem would probably have been to find another car.

How dull.

Instead, we stopped time, opened the Dom Pérignon and put her on a carbon-neutral broom.

The Big Bad Wolf’s GPS failure somehow led us into the two sides of customer complaints.

Rapunzel’s trolls took us to back waxing, AC/DC and the things we expect people to endure in order to look right.

An angry dragon with a broken toaster reminded me that being angry and communicating anger are not quite the same thing.

None of those connections travelled in a straight line.

Neither do we.

Fruitloop is very good at giving me the push.

Then she watches.

Sometimes she has to pull me back.

Sometimes she has to correct my fairy tales.

Frequently.

Sometimes she only needs one sentence.

“No wonder she lost her shoe.”

And the whole ridiculous construction falls into place.

That, for me, is where the sparkle is.

Not in finding the clever answer.

Not even necessarily in finding the right answer.

It is in allowing a conversation enough room to misbehave.

Because every so often, somewhere between a gummy bear, a furious dragon and a bottle of champagne that has no legitimate reason to be there, something worth keeping turns up.

And if it does not?

There is always next week at FLU.

Assuming I survive the course.