Potato - Shes got lovely skin

"She's got a lovely skin," said a deep voice in tones of admiration, and I turned around  in surprise to look at the speaker. The place certainly seemed an unlikely setting for romance, for I had dropped into a local Allotment Holders’ Show to see a friend's exhibit, and so far the conversation had been entirely of vegetable produce. The speaker whose back was towards me, seemed an equally unlikely subject, in his old coat with the typical baggy pockets of the gardener. Curiosity getting the better of me, I tiptoed to his side as he repeated, endearingly: "A lovely skin!” With broad thumb he stroked ~- a prize potato.

To me, as to most housewives, the skin of a potato is something to be peeled off, aud I had always considered the corner of the show where brown lumpe were arranged in neat circles as dull in the extreme. But the old man's loving comment made me look closer, and the closer I looked, the more astonished I became. Did I say “brown” lumps? Something strange had happened, to the potato family, or else I was seeing visions, for the exhibits shone with rainbow hues. The brown one touched with pink I had met in my kitchen, but here were circles of vivid rose, outvying the beetroot, and here, in the centre proudly carrying off both prizes, was something that could only be described as the “Miss Modern of the family”. Hers was the skin our friend had admired, a skin of the dashed sunburn hue and staring from it, were eyes of brilliant purple, surmounted by pencilled eyebrows of tho same shade. With trembling hand I plucked the gardener's sleeve and pointed to the nightmare. He took a specimen on his palm and stroked it.

 "Shes new, she is," he said, “and a good ‘un, too - - try her baked, with a pinch o’salt and a bit o’butter." 

He turned it over and the potato regarded me superciliously from beneath three more purple brows. Politely I agreed with the gardener ~~ baking was the only possible method how could one peel under the glare of those eyes? Shaken, I turned my back on cabbages and marrows and sought the safety of the street.  I shall not dare to go next year, for who knows what jealous onion or turnip may have caught the colour craze too?