Should honesty bring misfortune to its possessor?

The farmers' market at the foreshore starts at eight-thirty on Sunday mornings, so my mother and I usually get there early and go for a walk along the beach first. This morning we arrived at eight, while they were still setting up, but the strawberry lady, my goodness, she already had a queue six deep. So we joined it, strawberries being on our list, and only had to wait ten minutes. I wasn't paying attention to the woman in front of us until I heard the strawberry lady say, "That will be ninety dollars*, please." Ninety dollars! On strawberries! She walked off with a pallet of them. Six kilos. That's an awful lot of strawberries. If you're spending that much on strawberries, how much is the whole dinner? Unless they're having an all-strawberry feast, I suppose, but that seems unlikely. Anyway, the strawberry lady was looking stressed. "We sold out by ten last year," she said. "One woman cried."

Also looking stressed were the ladies in the arty homewares and jewellery shop when I went to buy a pair of earrings for my mother yesterday. They had just opened a new box of sticky tape and every roll was faulty. It was playing havoc with with their gift-wrapping.



* That's ≈ US$62/€56/£48.