Pears of Granite
Eddie Izzard was right. Pears really are "gorgeous little beasts", although I have severe doubts about whether I will actually get to eat one this year.
I love citrus fruits and berries but I don't normally buy apples, pears and the like because you tend to have to make a commitment to eating a whole one. If you open a satsuma you can eat the segments slowly without worry that they'll go brown from oxidisation and berries, of course, are perfect little self-contained wonders. Not so with an apple: leave it for five minutes while you take a phone call and you come back to something that looks like it's already decomposing.
Which is why I was glad to see some small pears in the supermarket when I grabbed some groceries before my evening calls last Thursday. Of course, they were hard when I got them but I was hoping that they'd ripen up over night and that I'd be able to have one for breakfast the next day, or over the weekend, or maybe on Monday. But by Tuesday morning they still felt like they'd been carved from jade.
That was a little disappointing as I had to go away for a couple of days and I expected that I'd return to a bowl of liquid pear goop. But no. This evening I returned home and found the pears are still giving me a nine or 10 on Mohs scale. So maybe I'll get to have pears for breakfast and maybe they'll have their moment of ripeness overnight and they'll be "dead pears" in the morning.
