Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
protect Natalie in the same way that he protects Ultime. I have to make sure that we're not
left alone together because he's obviously harbouring some deep-seated jealousy towards me.
Is it jealousy? Or does he just dislike mods?
Despite the potential for serious animal-related injury and my natural dislike for physical
labour, I actually had things that I needed to do outside. I had to harvest the quince.
It is not a role I had ever envisaged having in life, quince harvesting. I'm not even - and I'm
aware how ridiculous a statement this is - much of a fruit fan. It's a messy business eating
fruit and you're liable to get a squirt in the eye or, worse still, stains on your shirt and as such
I shy away from it. I do love my orchard, though.
The previous owners, Monsieur and Madame Lebrun, had planted twenty-one fruit trees to
mark their daughter's twenty-first birthday - various varieties of apple, plum, cherry, pear,
medlar, quince, walnut. It was a beautiful gesture if you're going to stick around to enjoy the
results and watch them grow, but has a whiff of sadness about it if you then decide to sell up
a couple of years later, which they had done. Much of what they did to the house when they
renovated was with their daughter (and especially future grandchildren) in mind. They put a
secure fence around the pond, the swimming pool is raised, and the upstairs ceiling-to-floor
gabled windows have child safety 'balustrades'; they obviously had planned to grow old there
and watch their grandchildren run around the place. But then their daughter had declared to
them one day that she had no intention whatsoever of having any children and immediately,
seemingly in a fit of pique, they had put the house up for sale. We turned up less than a week
later putting paid to any 'second thoughts' and so they'd moved on before the trees, as if mir-
roring the person they'd been planted in honour of, had borne fruit. We were the lucky bene-
ficiaries and had taken full advantage.
This was the first time, though, that we had had a crop of quince in successive years since
we moved here, which either says something positive about my orchard management skills
or that I'd been doing something terribly wrong previously. Anyway, not only did we have a
crop, we had a bumper crop. At a rough guess I'd say at least 40 kilos of the stuff. Normally
I'd make a few jars of chutney, some quince 'Turkish Delight' or even a quince cordial and
that would be that but I was still working my way through last year's crop.
Quince is a brute of a fruit, like a slightly hairy cross between an apple and a pear. They can't
be eaten raw and their cores are so tough they wouldn't break down in a nuclear holocaust,
so to actually do anything with the things takes something of a run up. I'm aware that this all
sounds like a bit of a hissy fit at the Women's Institute, but (aside from charging people to
throw them at Junior) I was running out of ideas of what to do with it all. You can't rush a
good chutney either, and making the 'Turkish Delight' is not only a slow, highly involved pro-
cess it's bloody painful as the boiling hot quince spits at you from its cauldron. So I'd taken
to wearing protective goggles and Marigolds - all mod-approved naturally! Not, it has to be
said, an incredibly manly way of doing it, but I was once taken to task by a heckler in the
