The Brief Life of the Apricot
The first thing to say about the apricot is that the apricot you have eaten is almost certainly not an apricot. It is some other thing — a small, pale, mealy disappointment about the size of a golf ball, picked underripe so it could survive a refrigerated lorry, and arrived at your supermarket in roughly the condition of an upholstered eraser. You bite into it and find no juice and no perfume and a faint sourness that fades into wool. You think: I have never really liked apricots, and you put the rest of the punnet in the fruit bowl, where it sits for several days going slowly grey before being thrown away in a thoughtful silence. This is not the fruit's fault. The actual apricot — picked at the right moment, eaten within about forty-eight hours of leaving the tree, in a place where the sun has been doing its job all summer — is one of the great quiet miracles of the season. It is heavy in the hand. The skin is faintly furred, like a cat's ear. The flesh is the colour of a sunr...
