Pear-faced cheek

THIS week's guest fruit is the avocado which, as well as not actually being a fruit – it's technically a berry – has been getting a great deal of attention recently. That's a shock to the system for any fruit – sorry, berry – but especially one that spent decades being pretty much ignored by everyone except my mum (who used a hollowed out avocado as a receptacle for prawn cocktail every Christmas Day between 1979 and 1986) and Ian Fleming, who makes James Bond eat one for pudding in Casino Royale when he's dining with Vesper Lynd.

Yup, pudding. Washed down with a 1943 Taittinger Blanc de Blanc Brut, if memory serves.

But now the avocado is everywhere. All over breakfast menus in hipster coffee bars, where “smashed avo” on toasted artisan bread is an expensive delicacy. All over Instagram, where people post pictures of their smashed avo before they eat it (well at that price you'd want something to remember it by, wouldn't you?). And in accident and emergency units across North London, where traces of it can be found in wounds self-inflicted by people trying to save money on their hipster coffee bar smashed avo habit by re-creating the dish at home: the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons is calling for safety labels on avocados following a sharp (sorry) rise in hand injuries as novice avocado users slice through nerves and tendons while attempting to de-stone the pesky fruits. Berries. Whatever.

In Australia, meanwhile, young people have been taken to task for daring to blow up to $22 on a smashed avo treat. “How can young people afford to eat like this?” wrote one hectoring moralist in The Australian, a Sydney-based newspaper. “Shouldn't they be economising by eating at home? How often are they eating out? Twenty-two dollars several times a week could go towards a deposit on a house.”

It's no wonder, then, that avocado prices have rocketed this year – and no wonder that enterprising thieves are cashing in. New Zealand has seen a spate of avocado larceny, with thieves using rakes to drag them straight off the trees. And in California earlier this month, three men were arrested on suspicion of grand theft avo – I think that's the technical term – when $300,000 worth of produce disappeared from a distribution and storage facility near Los Angeles.

Next week: the Kiwano, or African Horned Melon.

God save King Barry

IN an affecting and eye-opening interview in Newsweek in which he opens up about the death of his mother and which, most people agree, does him credit, Prince Harry has this to say about the day job: “Is there any one of the royal family who wants to be king or queen? I don’t think so.”

Fine, I'll do it. Not full-time obviously. I have this column to write, and I'm thinking of opening an avocado farm: money to be made there, clearly. But maybe a day a week would be OK. Or a day a month. Or just for a single 24-hour period that I can live-stream via my “Crown Cam”. I'm sure they sell them in Halfords.

Come to think of it, the monarch thing could be a job-share with anybody else who wants to pitch in and who promises not to make it illegal to hate cats or like Ed Sheeran's Galway Girl. Or maybe we could just have a public vote for someone to do it full-time with a telethon to pick a winner, who'll likely be either Olivia Colman or Sadiq Khan. Or – and how we'd laugh if this happened – Prince Harry.

Selfie-indulgence

IF you reacted with indignant defiance to me dissing people who post pictures of their smashed avo breakfasts on Instagram, you're probably the sort for whom every day is National Selfie Day. If not, it was last Wednesday, so if you're only finding out about it by reading this, you've missed it.

Otherwise, you may have indulged and, if you weren't horrified by the result(s), have posted them online. At the time of writing, there were 263,777 Instagram posts tagged #nationalselfieday and from a cursory look I'd say that, as predicted, about 100 per cent of them were shot by people for whom a selfie is a daily rather than an annual event.

So what's the point of it all? Well it did generate one or two items of note. For instance someone called Diane Black, a Tennessee Congressman (her choice of title) got her grandchildren to show her how to work her phone in time to snap a selfie with Ivanka Trump, the First Daughter. If you Google it, Black's the one at the front in the pearl necklace and bright red Dame Edna Everage specs, grinning like she's just won the lottery. Trump's the one doing the 15th-selfie-of-the-day-and-it's-not-even-lunchtime face.

Deep under the ground (or, more likely, at the back of the school computer lab), National Selfie Day had the internet meme miners working double-time too. They were predictable enough in their approach to the subject – it's a corrosive narcissism: you should be ashamed of yourself – but there were one or two gems chiselled out of the rock. My favourite was the split-screen meme showing, on the left, a NASA astronaut, and on the right, a pouting young woman in a shiny public loo. “Went to the moon, took five photos,” says the first caption. “Went to the bathroom, took 37,” runs the other.

A first-class whine

IF you've ever baulked at the lack of leg room on a budget airline – you'll be lucky if the “pitch”, the best measure of distance, is more than 30 inches – spare a thought for the poor souls forced by fame or phenomenal wealth to fly first class on British Airways.

Brian May, badger-loving guitarist in 1970s rock group Queen, is one such unlucky punter. “As soon as I'm up there above the clouds, I feel lucky and excited – like a kid on a treat,” he wrote recently, in what could have been an unused lyric from an unreleased solo project but was actually part of a blog post in which he railed against the configuration of BA's first class cabin.

As with Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, there's lots of piffle to get through before you reach the good bit so I'll spare you his thoughts on experiencing “the perfect sequential stereo picture as the plane surges forward” and “the ever-changing wonders of the planet”, and bring you to the meat of the complaint: it wasn't the leg room that bothered him so much as the lack of view.

May likes to look out of the window, you see, but now all his £10,300 one-way ticket gets him is a huge reclining sofa thing “about three feet from the window and so low down all you can see from your seat is a small patch of sky. It's boring … Even if you make an effort to clamber closer to the window to get a better view you're totally thwarted. They've put all sorts of junk between the seat and the window – a table, a ledge, an annoying cubbyhole which holds almost nothing – and finally – a massive inner screen containing the blinds which stops you getting any closer than nine inches to the actual window. It completely sucks.”

I'm sure it completely does suck. Still, on the upside you don't have three heavily-tattooed hen party toughs behind you kicking the seat-back and burping the tune to Ed Sheeran's Galway Girl. Do you?