me too, it even got in my first novel...
The day when I mentioned the girl at the ice-rink we were drinking slightly out of date bottles of cheap cherryade. Colin was shredding the paper label of the bottle. I was reading the ingredients, one of which was cherry flavouring.
"How do you think they get cherry flavouring?" Colin asked me.
"I think they invented it in a lab with chemicals. I doubt it actually tastes like cherry, it's just the red colour makes you think it tastes like it. The colour suggests the flavour, like orange things, orange Smarties don't actually taste of orange but we say they do."
"Yes they do," Colin said.
"They've managed to con you then."
"Nobody cons me." Colin said and wriggled more comfortably into my back. "I wonder what purple tastes like?" I thought for a bit.
"I think it tastes like the purple fruit."
"The purple fruit. There is no purple fruit."
"Purple is a fruit. It's warty and purple coloured and the size of Simon's head."
"That must be a big fruit then."
"It is," I said.
"Must be difficult to tell which is the fruit and which is his head."
"Especially when he's angry."
"What does the purple fruit taste like then?"
"Well," I thought a bit more. "It tastes like Parma Violets."
"Yuck. I won't be drinking purple-ade some time in the future then."
"I saw a girl the other day at the skating rink."
"What?"
"I saw a girl at the skating rink. A lovely perfect kind of girl."
"What did she look like."
"Sort of, perfect."
"When was this?"
"Last week, about eleven o'clock."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"I didn't really think about it until just now. Talking about Parma Violets made me think about her, because Parma violets made me think about Parma Ham, and of course that made me think about food named after places and people. That made me think about Garibaldi and his Redshirts, who were also known as the 'Thousand Volunteers.' Hitler's Reich was to last a thousand years and he had the same type of moustache as The Tramp, a creation of Charlie Chaplin. That led me to think of the girl at the ice-rink because Chaplin had made a short comedy in 1916 called 'The Rink' where he roller- skated around with the most amazing finesse and skill; and that reminded me of the way the girl was on the ice. Simple really." Colin sighed, jabbed her elbow into my back and then tried to strangle me in a friendly kind of way.
This bit always went down well at readings.