Today, for the first time in my life, I am bottling fruit. Pears to be exact which, at the moment I can get for free (although I'm not doing this to save money). A friend of mine is currently working at a pack-house where they have been packing pears for export. As a perk of the job they are allowed to take a bag of fruit home each night. He is sick of the sight of pears so I asked if he would get me some. Ask and you shall receive. Right now I'm halfway through filling a 9 litre stock pot with peeled pear quarters and I barely made a dent in the bag of fruit he gave me.
This afternoon I stopped the supermarket to get a few more preserving jars. Must be a sign of the times, but the first shop I went to had a total of two 300ml preserving jars in stock. Wow. I won't get far with that, I thought. So I trotted over a block to the next shop. They didn't stock them at all! The third shop did, and I almost cleared the shelf when I took six 1 litre jars (with lids) to the check-out.
The girl at the check-out swiped the first jar across the bar code scanner and was visibly surprised by how light it was. She held it up to the light and looked at it. She looked at the other five jars, then looked at me and said...
"That is the first time, in all my time on check-out, I have ever seen anyone buy jars with nothing in them."
"Terribly old-fashioned isn't it?" I said smiling.
5:35:40 PM 
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