The ping pong players at the Chinese community centre bring in a lot of food to share: fruit, biscuits, cake. The kitchen downstairs gives them the unfinished soup from lunch.
One day, one of the players was eating a banana when I said, “Don’t throw the skin away, give it to me.”
He asked why, so I told him the story about the time I asked my full-time BA students at the university for their banana skin. Up shot their eyebrows: "Why do you want the skin?" I said: “The university pays me too little.”
Since then, it’s become a joke between me and this particular ping pong player: he gets to eat the flesh, I get the skin. He’d wish me each time he gave me his skin: “Enjoy your dinner!”
(London, 2008 & 2022)
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