As one trundles (as one does) slowly though what I still, twenty years later, think of as the new Sandwell and Dudley station one passes a substantial modern factory building decorated with a red-and-white flower logo and the slogan
Welcome to the home of CARNATION
For reasons probably connected to jelly, tinned peaches, and childhood, I naturally associated this with red and white tinned evaporated milk. The milk was always disappointingly white, and not red. It was the tins that were red and white. But you knew that.
Come to think of it, I do not know that I have seen tinned evaporated milk for a very long time. Is it just that I do not visit the right aisles of the supermarket?
And I think I have only once been present at the opening of a tin of condensed milk. Once was often enough. There was a Brazilian who shared an office with me as a graduate student who used to drink milk with sugar in it when the rest of us were acquiring the coffee addiction which is a necessary qualification for academic preferment. She brought a tin of condensed milk in one day.
Imagine, then, my surprise as we trundled slowly though Sandwell and Dudley last night (I was half asleep...) to see that the slogan is in fact
Welcome to the home of CARNATION footcare
One does hear that some people do very strange things with feet.