Being Careful With The Taste of Summer

I’m turning 51 on Sunday. Now is not the time to dwell on how I’ve made it this far. Sheer, dumb luck largely. I have no plans. I’m still living in the shell shock aftermath of COVID and assorted traumas. I know it’s been years, but I’ve always been a bit of a slow learner. I’ll probably have shaken it off by the time I’m 55.

I was however, compelled to look at how much I have changed as a person last week when I went to Kettles’ Yard in Cambridge with my best beloved for a very much belated Valentines’ Day trip.

It isn’t that I chose to go to a museum for my gift. I’ve always been a huge culture nerd. It was far sillier than that.

We got to Cambridge early. The restaurant I had chosen for our pre-exhibition lunch wasn’t yet open. We went for a wander and I fell in the door of an extremely fancy looking delicatessen. What drew me in was a basket of the most glorious looking beef tomatoes in the window.

For the past two years I have been obsessed by finding and eating good tomatoes and in this post Brexitpocalypse wasteland, that is becoming a harder and harder thing to do. Sure, you can get them in supermarkets (mostly) but they are just red balls of watery mush that don’t really taste of anything. I crave the fancy, tasty sorts. The heirlooms, the beef, the plum, the striped, the weird and wonderful - GIVE ME THE ONES THAT TASTE LIKE SUMMER - and it’s these that are almost impossible to find now.

I knew the ones in the deli would be expensive. Even the mush ball ones are expensive now. But I had to have one. It was a need. A compulsion. Something that couldn’t be denied, which is why I ended up paying six quid for one tomato. Admittedly it weighed half a kilo, but still. Six quid. One tomato.

My husband declared my madness on the spot and washed his hands of the whole affair.

The man in the deli gave me my tomato in a paper bag and I carried it gently out of the shop like a prized jewel.

It struck me that the young me would have taken this opportunity to side with my husband and check me into the nearest asylum. Back in the day, six quid would have been lunch, or a couple of pints, or entry to a nightclub. That’s what six quid burning a hole in my pocket would have got me, or a pile of secondhand paperbacks from a charity shop.

Not a fucking tomato.

But I was so happy. Crazy happy.

At the restaurant I put the tomato on the table in front of me so that I could a) admire it and b) not squash it.

Several times I pointed out to my husband how beautiful it was. He rolled his eyes (like the young me, trapped inside this middle aged, lunatic carcass).

When we got to Kettles’ Yard, you had to check your bags and coats in at the cloakroom because there is a lot of art and no barriers between you and it. We did as we was told and sat obediently waiting for our turn to go in. As we waited I watched several women go up to the cloakroom attendant and check in their bags:

‘Could you be careful with that, please? It’s got ceramics in it and I’m worried about them breaking.’

‘Could you look after this, please? It’s got my work laptop in it and I’m worried about it getting damaged.’

I stayed for a bit longer, idly people watching before I suddenly sat bolt upright. Oh. My. God.

I went dashing up to the cloakroom and uttered the immortal lines:

‘Could you check that my bag isn’t being squashed please? I’ve got a very big tomato in there.’

And that was the moment young me turned her toes up and died of embarrassment and middle aged me didn’t give two shits about how mad I sounded and was quite proud of her priorities, all things considered.

p.s. I got it home in one piece. I ate it over two days. It was so delicious I simply made an enormous tomato salad with it. It was heaven. Money well spent.