I've just spent ten minutes shouting at chutney. This is the kind of thing writers do during the day, along with searching the house for chocolate and watching programmes featuring antiques. Sometimes they Hoover. Even less often, they write. So, why the shouting? Because the chutney had raisins in it. It said, 'Pear Chutney' on the label, but I swear there was more raisin in it than pear. 'Pear Chutney' is a decoy, because, in fact, ALL chutney is Raisin Chutney, they just don't want us to know it. Any other fruit or vegetable present is just there to provide covering fire to get the raisins in. The apples are there going, 'Okay, on my signal... RAISINS, GO, GO, GO!' And in the raisins go, diving deep into the chutney to lurk in the depths like the devious little interceptors they are.
I'm not crazy (citation needed). Raisins should not exist. You know what happened, don't you? Someone looked at a grape and thought, how can we make this worse? I know, let's suck out some of the vitamin C and quadruple the sugar. And, hey, let's make it brown.
My dentist once advised me to avoid white wine and raisins to preserve my enamel. Now, you may not know me personally, reader, but let me tell you, yesterday I had been in an artisan wine shop for 5 minutes and without me saying a word or buying a thing, the owner came over and offered me a loyalty card. I look like a wine-drinker. I do not look like a raisin-eater. My dentist may as well have told me to avoid white wine and luxury holidays in the Caribbean.
When I told my sister I was writing this, she said, 'But you used to love rum and raisin ice cream!' Let's clear this up. I used to love rum and raisin ice cream when I was a child and it was the only way I could get rum, which was illicit at that age and therefore exciting. Now I'm allowed rum, I don't need raisins.
I remember a few years ago Liz Hurley revealed the secret of her extremely svelte figure, which was essentially, 'eat fuck all'. When I feel like I need to lose some weight, I also have a regime, which is 'throw a daily hissy fit at the bathroom scales and try not to eat all the cheese'. Anyway, in between eating fuck all, Ms. Hurley allowed herself snacks. The snack specifically mentioned was 'six raisins'. Yep. Six raisins. It is fair to assume I live in a much more modest house than Hurley and yet I'm pretty sure I could burn off the calories in six raisins by walking to the kitchen to get six raisins. This is all kinds of wrong. She could had a Tic Tac, but instead she went for mummified scrotums of sticky tooth-rot.
Two days ago, I became aware that other people may not feel as strongly as I do about raisins. A friend posted on Facebook, 'If you could rid the world of one thing, what would it be?' I immediately wrote 'raisins' and moved on. Later, after receiving further notifications about it, I checked back and decided to have a look, out of curiosity, at what the three people who had commented before me had nominated. They had wanted to rid the world of liars, racism and bigotry. Which made me consider carefully how important it really was to rid the world of raisins. And I came to the conclusion that settling for fourth on the list was fine by me.
Arm yourselves, people. After bigotry, we're taking raisins down.