There is a perfectly positioned fruit stall just outside Holborn tube station. Anyone walking along High Holborn has to go straight past it and it is always beautifully arranged first thing in the morning. People frequently stop there and buy fruit for the day or for the office.

It has a lot going for it in terms of bargaining power as there is no other fresh fruit stall nearby, and the trader who runs it seems to have plenty of expertise. There’s only one problem, which is that the stall owner bellows out his offers in a way that is attention-grabbing but impossible to understand. He sounds like an Evening Standard newspaper seller bawling out the name of his paper incomprehensibly – just like the famous Morecambe and Wise sketch where Eric is selling the “Eening Stannit”.

The issue with this is that when negotiating, if you are making a bid, the other side does actually need to understand what you mean. If you are impossible to understand, then it’s less likely that people will accept your offer. I’m sure this fruit stall does pretty well, but how much better might he do if passers by actually understood the offers he was making? Then he really could be top banana…