Romance around a pineapple

All of Spain is caught up in a new craze. It’s one where singles, or simply anyone looking for a flirt, goes shopping at the Mercadona supermarket between 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. and wanders around the fruits and vegetables section with an upside-down pineapple in an otherwise empty shopping cart, signaling that they’re open to an exciting evening. A sort of Tinder among the tomatoes, you might say. An idea that quickly took over all social media and even made it to the national TVE news, and later, to BBC News.

As you know, dear reader, there is no mountain too high and no sea too deep for this reporter to venture into for your sake. So, I had my wife drop me off at the supermarket at exactly 7:00 p.m. It started off badly, as I had no change on me and couldn’t find a euro to unlock a shopping cart. I had to rush back to my wife to ask for a euro. She gave me that typical disapproving look that women reserve for when they think their husbands are being ridiculous. “Here, go play,” she said, handing me a euro, as if I were a child allowed to take a ride on the mechanical horse at the supermarket entrance. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I clumsily dropped the euro, which rolled onto the ground and stopped at the feet of a young woman who had just parked next to our car and was getting out. She was wearing a short pencil skirt, and as I saw her gracefully bend over to pick up my euro and hand it back to me with a smile around her red-lipsticked lips, I thought, “Yes, hello! This looks promising,” a thought I certainly would have had in my single days. I glanced over at my wife in the car and saw her smirking too, though it was the kind of smirk you see in spy movies just before the Russian spy hands the protagonist a poison drink—shaken, not stirred.

I quickly hurried to the supermarket entrance, grabbed a cart, checked if my shirt was properly tucked