It’s plum season.

I’m picky when it comes to fruit – only local plums (and apples and strawberries etc) are worth buying. “Local” here means Swedish ones. I’d totally buy Estonian plums if I was in Estonia now, or Finnish or Norwegian ones if anyone offered them to me. (I assume they grow plums in Finland.) Italian-grown plums and Spanish ones, on the other hand, the kinds you get in a standard supermarket, are flavourless crunchy sugar water. They just don’t taste like plums at all. Like, if you told me to close my eyes and then gave me a bite of one, I don’t know if I would even recognise what fruit it was.

I want my fruit to be really ripe. I want it to burst in my mouth when I bite into it, and the juices to be near dripping. When Ingrid and Adrian eat fruit, they want them firm and crunchy, almost regardless of fruit – plums, peaches, apricots, kiwis… Well, no crunchy bananas, but they definitely prefer their bananas so green that I find them nearly inedible. When buying for myself, I look for the ripest fruit. I choose the plums that are so juicy and tender that I have to handle them carefully, and gently place them topmost in my shopping bag. I’m pretty sure that I rescue fruit that everybody else skips over, and that the staff would pick out and throw away if they could be bothered to look over the fruit they have.