Cherry picking

On my first day back in Exmoor, the Archers Omnibus distracts me enough to have me haring off down one road in precisely the opposite direction than intended. A bonus is that I glimpse a ‘Cherries for sale’ sign, and having just heard a radio show championing this most fleeting of summer fruits I decide to pay the farm a call. The place is delightful in an Enid Blyton-esque way, well-kept orchards of apples and cherries and barnfuls of traditional fruit boxes. Living as I do on an inhospitable (to fruit, that is) windswept northern mountain, I brimmed over with envy at all this bounty and sunshine. I entered the deserted ‘shop’ barn to find a disappointing sign ‘Due to the weather, no cherries until Monday’. On sale there were two punnets of plums and some very rudimentary plastic bottles of home-made scrumpy. I realised I had only notes in my purse, but quashed my slight irritation at the lack of the promised fruit and the inevitable overspend ahead. Looking around more carefully, I found there were unpriced punnets of split cherries abandoned on the scales. I tasted one, they were very sweet, but clearly not intended for sale.
I put together a bag of items that I thought would cost about a tenner (including the split cherries) and left the owner a note by his till.
As I left he appeared at the shop door, and regaled me with a long story of the year’s disasterous cherry crop – good for nothing but schnapps now; the greed of the supermarkets and the impossibility of attracting pickers, with all the health & safety regulations.

“Give me a call when you want to buy the place off me” was his parting shot.
Don’t tempt me, I thought.

Themes : orchard