Yesterday evening, after a hard day at Carnival and in pursuit of some nourishment to stave off inevitable scurvy, I squirrelled into a multi-pack bag of clementines, purchased the day before at Sainsbury’s, Tooting.

As I absent-mindedly shuffled into the living room, I noticed that the fruit I had selected was particularly squishy. No huge cause for alarm, but on giving it a gentle shake, it jingled. Pretty sure fruit isn’t supposed to do that. On closer inspection, I noticed a very precise slice around its circumference:

With a gentle squeeze, the clementine’s peel popped open, revealing this:

And now I’m slap bang in the centre of one of the greatest fruit mysteries ever to befall Tooting. Who is Simon? What does he WANT? Why has he paid 40p for a clementine from a £1.50 multi-pack? Is he rich? IS THIS A TREASURE HUNT?

THE FACTS:

The multi-pack was purchased from Sainsbury’s, Tooting, on Sunday morning, for £1.50.

The bag had no obvious signs of having been tampered with.

The cut around the clementine was precise, and the fruit within had been removed cleanly. This is a man who knows fruit.

The skin had been gently resealed with what I guess is probably glue stick. HOWEVER, is it possible that the swift resealing following the fruit removal could be attributed to the skin’s natural bonding agents? Fruit experts?

My initial tweet has now been retweeted nearly 1,200 times (by far my most popular tweet ever – a damning indictment of the banality of my standard musings). Can we #FindSimon? I owe him, like, 7p, or something.

Also, a few Poirots on Twitter have called ‘fake’ because there’s a pen in the original picture. Far be it from me to question this insight but I’d say that the presence of a pen in the photograph is unlikely to have any bearing on its authenticity. Pens are, after all, everywhere. That, and the fact that our kitchen table is always covered in junk.