Of purple potatoes and misshapen eggs

Seeing the recent news reports about the nightmarish invention that is the purple potato did get me wondering about something else.

Whatever happened to square eggs?

I have distinct memories of once seeing an item on Tomorrow's World about a fantastic new technology that could produce such a thing. Thankfully, they made them square after they left the chicken, and not before.

But supposedly this was going to revolutionise our egg-buying habits, as square eggs could be packed into cartons more closely than oval eggs and weren't in the habit of rolling over and falling off things to their doom.

And yet, despite the obvious advantages of such a thing, all these years later not one of my local supermarkets stocks anything that even resembles a square egg.

For that matter, they don't stock the square tomatoes Tomorrow's World promised me either, nor the soya bean steak that's indistinguishable from the real thing. It seems that, however trustworthy Raymond Baxter and his friends may have seemed, for all those years, they were just stringing us along.

And as for their claims that one day every house would own a videotape recorder, well, here we are in the 21st Century and I don't know anyone who owns one. Will these things never become a part of our everyday reality?