You may be surprised, as I was to discover there is such a thing as an emergency avocado but apparently this tropical fruit is one of the top most ordered items from Waitrose to be delivered by Deliveroo to people desperate for an avocado.

An unlikely item to be ordered by so many I would have thought but no, avocados were among Waitrose’s top five most requested items through the delivery app in every city in the UK and were the most in-demand in Oxford, Cambridge and Brighton.

Strangely the fruit was also popular in the north, with avocados in fourth place in Newcastle and second in Glasgow and Birmingham which one might not have expected although Waitrose suggested the emergency avocado trend was driven by people wanting to enjoy brunch on Saturday or Sunday.

So what conclusions can be drawn from this sudden upsurge in the desperate desire for an avocado and the demographic of the towns who favour this tropical fruit most highly.

All the towns mentioned have top Universities which are all part of the Russell Group except Brighton University which was formed as Brighton School of Art in 1858 and is now a public University based on four campuses in Brighton and Eastbourne, only achieving University status in 1992, however with the town’s high proportion of gay people it is also well known as the gay capital of Great Britain.

So it seems that students from a number of Russell Group Universities and gay people are all partial to an avocado for brunch on Saturday or Sunday, which rather surprises me as the report also found that nearly 70 per cent of Waitrose customers said reducing their climate footprint was very important and are concerned about the environmental damage caused by intensive farming of avocados. 

As the old saying goes, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics and who knows what to believe, it could just be that Russell Group University students and gay people don’t give a damn about the environment as long as they can get their emergency avocados and lie when asked to fill in a questionnaire about the environment, I will leave it to you to decide!