Salad days

If you are in the market for a salad spinner, and you're on a budget, I can help you. There was one abandoned on my street this week. I saw it on my way to choir practice. I cannot guarantee that it had not been used as a latrine by passing wildlife – canine, volpine, humine. Any port in a storm.

Not that one ever seems to actively acquire a salad spinner. Has anyone ever bought one? They just seem to find themselves in your kitchen, stoutly defending their corner of a cupboard, all sturdy plastic and 70s colour scheme. An incongruous out-of-timer in an era of pre-packed salad and all its easy charms. A beige alien.

When I was little, a popular strand of storytelling by and for the young involved extraordinary, implausible, unresolvable adventure, culminating in the 'all a dream' get-out. Ninety-nine point seven per cent of the stories I wrote ended like this, fifty-two point seven per cent of the ones I read.

But eventually I learnt what I considered to be a highly sophisticated modulation. When the dreamer awoke to find themselves back in their own world, they would also find some kind of souvenir from the alternate reality they had slumbered themselves into. It wasn't a dream at all! Or was it? Or wasn't it? Or was it?

How could you deny your presence in another dimension, when right in front of your very eyes was an exotic shell, a pair of gloves, a quill, a salad spinner? How else could it have got there?