Paint and beauty are only skin deep, but potatoes….

Chatting idly to Karen at lunch tonight, I was able quite adroitly to steer the conversation eventually and finally away from Midsomer Murders and onto new potatoes, and naturally I asked her if she scraped hers, how I wish I hadn’t. “Of course not, that’s such a waste of time and anyway the skins are good for you, full of vitamins and things.”

I tried to hide my disappointment and returned, crestfallen, to the vitally important IT work, but I was struck by how little I knew this woman, on the surface more or less perfect, but then comes this revelation, ‘such a waste of time’ also hints at a far deeper malaise. I was sure she was going to be a scraper, really convinced of it, and then to find she’s a ‘just wash and boil’ person, well, I was taken aback and left feeling a bit disillusioned.

Perhaps Karen prefers the taste of the skins, or possibly she harbours a fear of nail-loss, she could be hydrophobic or relives a traumatic pre-divorce experience each time she holds a knife in one hand and a potato in the other. It’s symbolic. Here is just the place to apply Occam’s Razor, shaving away all the spurious theories, the simplest and best fit is that she refuses to spend her time on what she considers an unnecessary waste of it, or, exactly what she said.

I can’t recall many people in my past, if any, ever having been very willing to make the tubers go commando, and one or two wouldn’t even look at a potato, which left me either having to bow and scrape or just bend and scrape. Some are better than others for this I admit, but I’ve never found one yet that hasn’t benefited from some attention in a bowl of water. Nobody in their right mind would boil an unpeeled King Edward so why the carefree attitude to the new varieties? Titian wasn't very new, around 85, when he painted The Flaying of Marsyas, and it’s a painting I often think about when preparing the Murphys-nouvelle, I’d prefer not to, but it‘s a vivid reminder that there are worse things in the world of excoriation than just making potatoes all nice and smooth.

Marsyas, a Satyr punished by Apollo for some flute-based triumphalism, seems very stoically detached considering his plight, and during the laborious monotony of spud-stripping, it’s that kind of detachment that makes it all bearable.

The snacking dog was probably necessary in that gory scene in Hannibal, it was a gory film after all, but I think Titian could have omitted his small mutt; it is possibly the most disturbing part of the painting. Like any juxtaposition of intense horror and the blasé, it takes the suffering of the flaunting flautist beyond physical pain alone, to an undignified humiliation. Blood-spilling was just as popular with some people in the sixteenth century as it has always been, and was Titian pandering to it in a painting intended to shock?

This painting's subject matter is more subtly abhorrent than Bosch’s big triptych that is by comparison a grown-up page from My First Thousand Words or Goya’s uncooked-pork nightmares. Which, along with all the depicted decapitations of John the Baptist and Holofernes, are too animated and too impulsive, filled with urgency they lack the quiet concentration of the torturers and absorbed onlookers that Titian has captured, himself amongst them. The figure accompanying this scene on the viola is Apollo, who interestingly is shown as either disinterested or horrified with what he has imposed on hubristic Marsyas. It’s an oppressive and difficult work that by it’s parallel viewpoint and closeness makes it inescapably met head-on. Almost enough to make me think that I should just tip those spuds straight into a saucepan and escape the torment, but I know that would be wrong and I’d regret it, if not then, certainly twenty minutes later.

On a more uplifting note and this definitely is one, in bloke-mode there is the alternative, and far more pleasant potato-distraction, the very mild and appealing peeling scene to be found in the heady world of 1960’s Italian cinema, Sophia Loren doing her best in Ieri, Oggi, Domani. A film too enjoyable to even question if it’s any good.

However The Squeeze really was unquestionably a good film, so good that it’s not available on DVD (why?). It’s bleak and brutal British gangsters in 1977, and if you’ve seen it you’ll know the infamous scene with the disrobing, talented, but self-destructive Carol White, is not one that fits at all happily into potato world.

It might be better to not think of any of these things at all. But instead, contemplate the genius detective from Midsomer Murders, very much available on DVD (why?) formally Mr Bergerac, and if Jersey Royals are the best type of new potato to scrape, which was how this all started. I’m sure they’re not, and Karen can’t really offer an opinion, because she ‘just’ washes them. I’m now wondering if she cuts the skin off of cucumbers leaving each slice a perfect octagon, or does cucumber skin also happen to be, so very conveniently, full of vitamins and good for you.