I'm sure I mentioned my grandparents' ability to mummify fruit. I don't think they ever contemplated eating it, a deviance too far for people bought up on a diet of coal and fumes, eating fruit was as imponderable as homosexuality or the French. Anyway, once upon a time this child, upon admiring the long-standing ornamental bowl of fruit, was possessed of the strange and peculiar notion to take a bite out of one of those apples. That little nuggling of sibilant temptation. Truly, for a moment, I was Eve of Eden's blessed garden reaching out and sinking my teeth into that lasciviously green skinned flesh. I may as well have taken a bite out of Tutankhamen's four-thousand year old arse cheek. I think that apple was older than the Garden of Eden. It was probably forgotten in God's lunch box from the busy first week of creation.
Anyway, I'm a bit dubious about apples, I gag if I get once of those mushy or dry textured one. It's always a swift whack on the head with a stale madeleine that sends me tumbling back to that moment in my grandparents' parlour when I sink my teeth into that apple.
Supermarket apples are naff in general, no matter what they claim. We were wandering around Kent the other year when we stumbled across a shop on an apple farm and they had several varieties that simply don't make it to the shops. I have never eaten so many apples and they were in a completely different league to anything I've ever bought off the high street.