APPLE #366
Today a year ago we left Kimpton and started our adventure abroad: if you don’t know or don’t remember what happened at the beginning of it all, including why I chose to call this blog ‘an apple a day’, I suggest you go back to the first posts and find out!
The farmers’ market stalls were full of the new seasons apples today, and there were people bustling about picking and choosing fruits and vegetables of all kinds, all colours, all shapes, not all known to me but utterly delightful. Just how it should be at harvest time!
Not that I have heard a mention of harvest festivals here: these city dwellers are perhaps so far away from the land that other seasonal celebrations take precedence, like Oktoberfest (=drink beer and eat wurst, sauerkraut and pretzels) or halloween (horrid horrid homes and streets already creeping with skeletons and cobwebs and weird stuff all over the place) (not my thing at all).
But let me just mark the day with this no doubt rather unspecial post. I have not persevered with the apple theme, but I am glad I used it to start me off a year ago, to get my writing off the ground. In terms of eating an apple a day, in any case I got really bored with the supermarket apples in the summer: juicy and crunchy perhaps, still, and as pretty as ever, but flavour-poor; and what is the food value of a fruit that was picked a year ago in any case? We did enjoy watermelon almost every week though!
I had the pleasure of visits from TWO of my cousins in the last month: firstly Fran (ex- Maclaren) and Stu, with son Chris, 16, whose extraordinary wrist-flicking skills on the rubix cube had won him an all-expenses paid trip to the Red Bull World Cubing Championships in Boston. In the ‘rescramble’ category he came third - in the world - and so won entry to the Cubing world champs next year in Melbourne, Australia. They dropped by for a few days of NY madness, just days before Lesley (also ex- Maclaren) and Andy came in like whirlwinds and did EVERYTHING that New York had to offer, mostly on bikes, even in a torrential downpour, apparently with the thought that there was no point in stopping for rest while they were here with the long dark winter ahead of them on the little island where they live. Anyhow, it was fab to see them all, and Lesley managed to bring a little jar of homemade Herm Crabapple Jelly, so our theme is come full circle for today.
YOU really should book yourself a flight to New York and come and see what this is all about! I would love it if you did!