Writer Ruth Spencer only has one goal this year and it involves an avocado, a spoon and (obscurely) the musician Shayne Carter.
Big New Year's resolutions are out. Ten thousand steps a day, learn Italian, get off TikTok, become someone entirely different and better. Who wants to overhaul their lives when the kids are off school and the days drift into long hazy sunsets? You can take your ten thousand steps in any direction away from me.
This year I’m not making a momentous resolution. I’m making small tweaks. Tiny ones. Ones I can maintain that won’t turn into guilt-ridden failure by mid-January. Maybe even just one, why overdo things?
There’s one little life-tweak I’ve been obsessing about for a while. It’s this: I’m going to eat an avocado for dinner. With a spoon. Just an avocado, no toast, simply walking around with my spoon and my avocado. Free, ambulatory, nourished, probably still a bit hungry but nailing this whole avocado-spoon-pedestrian business.
The inspiration for this was the Shayne Carter documentary, Life in One Chord, in which he talks about meeting actress Miranda Harcourt while she’s eating an avocado for dinner with a spoon. It must have stuck with him or he wouldn’t have mentioned it all these decades later. He wrote a song about her, She Speeds, which doesn’t mention avocadoes, but you can’t be very speedy after a heavy dinner so maybe the avocado is implied.
This was in the 1980s, a time when avocadoes were new and exotic. My mother bought one to see what the fuss was about. She cut it into slices and we all had one and decided the tasteless, flabby nonsense could remain a mystery. I know now that it was underripe, and that ‘by the slice’ isn’t really a thing with avocadoes, but it was a formative experience. An avocadon’t.
How forward-thinking and glamorous was Miranda Harcourt, then, that she could casually consume this bizarre new fruit-vegetable as blithely as she would eat an apple, if indeed she would ever do anything so prosaic. It bewitched Shayne Carter and has gone on to bewitch me. Could my life have been different if I had eaten more avocadoes with spoons? Would I have been more dazzling, more arty, more fascinating, if I had consumed only this perfect food? There’s something goddess-like about it, as though Miranda Harcourt lounged on Olympus with nectar and ambrosia before her, but had instead brought her own DIY guacamole. And spoon.
I witnessed something almost as daring recently, and I’m not sure whether to incorporate it into my Tweakmas list. At the Auckland Santa Parade I saw a family of three eating, and I’m completely serious, an entire cucumber each, as if it were a banana, or a really sad iceblock. A mum, a dad and a little boy, each gripping a whole, full-sized unpeeled cucumber, munching away as they strolled around Aotea Square, perhaps in hopes of finding a food truck selling raw carrots. It was like a glimpse into an alternate universe where anything is possible, even treat-cucumbers. Eat up your ice cream, darling, or you won’t be allowed a cucumber.
I’ve never contemplated eating a whole cucumber. I’ve certainly never done it in public. But perhaps I’m already behind a trend that could make me more intriguing and captivate the hearts of angsty poets. If I met Shayne Carter while eating an entire vertical cucumber, would he have written a song about me? I have to think it’s possible. Surely it would have made an impression. But would it have been a love song?
So we’re tweaking. It’s avocado for dinner, the world’s simplest salad, a Manic Pixie Dream Meal. It's like ten thousand steps when all you need is a spoon. It’s probably not going to last past mid-January.
Ruth Spencer is the co-author, with Te Radar, of Kiwi Country, Rural New Zealand in 100 Objects. (Harper Collins New Zealand).
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