What are fruit companies trying to achieve by putting stickers on their fruit? I remember as a child when these first appeared on oranges and bananas, and I can cope with this because in these cases the sticker disappears without any inconvenience to the consumer when the skin is discarded.

Later, I remember the annoying advent of these little stickers appearing on all of our apples, but I coped, fiddling to remove each one and fold it until there weren't any sticky bits facing out and putting it in the bin before munching on my mildly more sour apple.

It seems now, however, that there's some sort of sinister psychological assessment happening, as they slowly increase the stickiness of the glue, and the softness of the fruit, in an effort to work out at what thresholds they will have a negative effect.

They've well exceeded it now, for me anyway. We recently got some Californian plums, where the stickers were designed like the price stickers on books, so that any attempt at removal breaks the sticker into irreparable parts. Even when I stripped the sticker off, it seemed all the gum was on the plum, and I had to use methylated spirits to clean it off. After going through this process a couple of times I ended up just cutting off that part of the fruit for the rest of the plums, and they definitely didn't taste nice at all, with such a souring process preceding the eating.

Now, it seems, we're being tested further with some soft and similarly stickered pears, so we have another brand to avoid. I can only hope that everyone else out there hates these damn things as much as I do, and the dogbertesque 'manufacturers' of these fruit meet with a sticky end.

Please can we bring back the days when I could choose my fruit on the basis of flavour, texture and price?