Ceci n’est pas une fraise

It looks like a fraise. When you squash twenty of these into a punnet they bruise and leach just enough juice to sort of smell like a strawberry. But when you cut them open, the white, pithy heart of the subject is revealed. This is not as it should be. The heart of a strawberry – the most frequently referenced fruit in highbrow erotic fiction, I’m told – should throb scarlet and smell of wet sun. Whizzed up with one of these, a smoothie might turn an anaemic shade of pink; chopped up with ripe orange fruits, these made a pretty weak claim to a place in my fruit salad this morning. Otherwise, they’re useless pieces of aerated matter, ripened too fast, stored in a too chilly environment and bumped and bruised to buggery. Balsamic, caster sugar, Pernod, they’d be wasted trying to salvage these. These were cheap strawberries, they’re not organic, and my hazy memories of Riverina and Corsican strawberry picking tell me that the season hits its peak in mid-summer. Mental note, etc.

I purchased these oh-so inadequate groundberries yesterday but this morning’s disappointment does not constitute the first relearnt Lesson of the day. No, after rushing home from yoga, the first relearnt Lesson I learnt on this day, the 19th of February, was never to believe a word any removalist says about arrival times. I rushed through Bondi Junction, ur-lieu of fantasy consumption, without even a glance at the new surfaces which have made last year’s old this year’s mesmerising new. I’m reading through some of Ballard’s novels from the early 70s and trying to draw together a set of ideas on shopping centres to write a paper or a short story or somesuch. I could have done research at sashay pace. Instead, I pierced my post-yoga calm and zipped home with barely a sniff to smell the berries. And for what? A phone call telling me there’s been a bit of a problem in the yard. Sigh. If I had a zoom lens, I’d take a photograph of the dog lolling on my neighbour’s balcony, the size and shape of an imaginary shaggy lion to cheer myself up. Oh well, I'm borrowing another neighbour's wireless connection to post this blog and that seems to be doing the trick.

And so I wait for the arrival of a bed and the long-awaited consummation of a plan to make my bed and lie in it. This particular enactment of the scene will have to unroll without any bedbound and languorous mastication of strawberries. Alas.