Cherries
There are roughly four weeks in the European year when the cherries are real. Before that, the supermarkets sell something called a cherry that has arrived from Chile or Turkey via a refrigerated container, and tastes the way a cherry would taste if you described one over the telephone. After that, the trees are bare and the market stalls have moved on to apricots. But for those four weeks, somewhere between the end of May and the middle of July depending on which latitude you're standing in, the proper fruit appears: dark, taut-skinned, heavy in the hand, gone again before you've quite caught up with it. Cherries are one of the few fruits that have not been bullied into year-round availability. They don't ripen after picking. They bruise if you look at them sideways. They are still, for the most part, picked by hand — there is no good way to mechanise the harvesting of something that detaches from the tree with a stem-tug. So we are still, with cherries, in roughly the s...
