Living in Scotland and just round the corner from a branch of Sainsbury's means I can sample the wonder of the Purple Majesty potatoes which have been in the news recently.

It was a weird moment when I bit into the first chunk - all my reflexes were anticipating the taste of beetroot because the shiny purple vegetable was shouting 'beetroot' to my memory.  And of course it tasted just the same as a Maris Piper or a Cara to my untrained palate.  But it was an odd moment, eyes, mouth and memory in tension!

They are great potatoes, once you've overcome the surprise of their purpleness, cook easily and taste good.  They are also allegedly higher in antioxidants so better for 'people like me' than ordinary white ones.

Of course the metaphors and parallels are easy to spot...  I think what struck me was that even though I knew this was a potato and I knew it would taste like a potato I could not shake the expectation that it would taste like a beetroot - it is one thing to be aware of and understand prejudice and presupposition, it is another to actively overcome it even when we really want to.

Not quite sure what comments a purple-mash topped cottage pie might generate, but it's interesting to imagine!  However the idea of Lancashire hotpot with red cabbage and purple potatoes is appealing...

I think that's a line from a song by the Pet Shop Boys but my knowledge of all things musical is very limited.  And anyway it's not relevant to what I'm going to write about, just the machinations of my muddled mind.

At the moment one of my tasks is preparing to submit my reearch work for an MPhil - I decided to 'exit' the doctoral programme on health grounds and assumed, rather naively, that the task to tidy up and submit my work would be minimal, afterall, everything had already been submitted and judged adequate along the way.  Alas, no.  It seems that it has to be re-worked from a portfolio of discrete items into a single contiguous thesis, hardly the work of five minutes.  I think I can find a way to do it that will minimise the level of re-writing - and I'm secretly quite pleased with my idea - but I am waiting conformation that this approach is OK and will not exceed the word count blah blah blah.

Meantime I started looking at the first of the papers yesterday - it is so B-O-R-I-N-G I cannot believe I wrote such a dull (and frankly not so great) paper.  So today when I did a quick blog review it was a relief to find the person who supervised and mark it posting on boring writing (here), and by a little following of links to discover that he even told other people that academic writing is meant to be boring (here).  So, I will do some overhauling of my ultra-boring paper but clearly it mustn't become jolly or the academy won't like it....

Today I have other less boring things to think about, but over the next weeks I will be being boring and turning my sow's ear into a pigskin purse fit for the boring eyes of the academy.