In the aisle of Tesco I stood like one thunderstruck. It was not the print of a man’s naked foot that took me aback, as it did Crusoe, but a tin of ‘Mandarin segments in juice’.
These days we get our entertainment where we can, and I had toyed with buying tinned goods against the next disruption of trade, as Margaret Thatcher had stocked up with 20 tins of fruit in 1974 against inflation.
But I had wondered that very morning what to call the shape made by cutting the top off a boiled egg. That is a spherical cap, I learnt. One thing led to another, and the next thing I knew was that a slice taken out of a spherical Christmas pudding (such that the straight sharp edge is the pud’s diameter) is called a spherical wedge.
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