It was a simple enough task. I just needed some cream. It\u2019s strawberry season here in Australia. Or at least I presume it is, since it\u2019s summer, and supermarkets are jammed with egg-sized berries. <\/p>\n
When you move to another hemisphere, you either take a crash course in botany<\/a> to familiarise yourself with the fact that plants \u2013 trees, grasses, fruits and vegetables \u2013 are different, or grow at different times of year, or you practise radical humility. <\/p>\n You point, jaw slack, at a fantastic tree that you later learn is commonly called a Bottlebrush tree, and you say something impossibly dim and embarrassing, such as \u201cWhat a completely fantastic tree!\u201d and you accept that you sound like a moron. <\/p>\n I grew up in the shade of lofty, conker-dropping horse chestnuts and pugnacious sycamores that would creak their way out through impossible gaps in the pavement, until their roots brought the walkway up two decades later. When I lived in Dublin, I\u2019d pack a sandwich and visit the \u201chungry tree\u201d at King\u2019s Inns<\/a>, which famously swallowed an iron bench almost whole. The sandwich was for me and not the tree, but you know. Just in case. <\/p>\n The natural world I know is dark foliage and damp moss, front gardens peppered with drunkenly tumbling nasturtiums in the summer. It\u2019s the soft, inoffensive graze of drizzle on the gauzy petals of pink roses in May. It isn\u2019t towering eucalyptus trees swaying in clumps, murmuring to one another in a hot, dry breeze. It isn\u2019t gigantic succulents leering at you from verges as you walk by, their heavy heads making them look down on their luck. It isn\u2019t thickety brush rustling with the primordial shrieking of insects or enormous, elaborate flowers that are trying so hard, as though they\u2019re about to marry Jeff Bezos. <\/p>\n So the familiarity of strawberries<\/a> appealed to me this week. I don\u2019t go in for an ascetic January. I think it has too much of the spirit of 1950s Ireland about it, and guarantees a hedonistic, butter-smothered crash by February. Instead, I smatter some unhealthy joys through the month like a person who doesn\u2019t see value in suffering for the sake of it. <\/p>\n After all, cutting dessert out entirely can, I choose to believe, be fatal. The withdrawal alone could kill me. So strawberries and cream sounded ideal. It\u2019s fruit, sort of. A bit \u201cnotions\u201d. Borderline British, even, but still very much acceptable within an Irish summer menu, and it is summer over here, so my defence would stand up in court. <\/p>\n [\u00a0The story behind roadside strawberry stands \u2013 one of the heralds of Irish summerOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n The tropical and unfamiliar fruits<\/a> I see in every Australian grocer\u2019s shop are a joy to eat \u2013 hefty, sugar-sweet mangoes and papayas, perfect \u201cyour-granny\u2019s-bathroom-sink-green\u201d avocados, the gnarled weirdness of Buddha\u2019s hands or the uncanny mundanity of a tangelo. <\/p>\n But a strawberry is a fruit you can rest a pint on. Not literally, but you know what I mean. It\u2019s a robust little fruit in all its weird shapes \u2013 cordate and oblate and globose and all the rest of them. A strawberry is a familiar, homely object. Macerate it in sugar and robe it in a thick cloak of double cream and you have yourself a mouthful of childhood summer holidays in west Cork<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u2018Every Irish person instinctively understands that cream comes from happy cows, and double cream from especially happy cows\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n It was a simple enough task. I just needed some cream. Never did I anticipate that this quest would pitch me into a vortex of homesickness that had me mentally drafting a letter of appreciation to the Irish dairy industry. <\/p>\n Because look, some people email me to say they think I\u2019m hard on Ireland. You could look at it that way. Really, I\u2019m invested in Ireland. I care deeply about it. I\u2019m pained by its errors and failings and take immense pride in its wins. I treat it like a part of myself, because that\u2019s what it is. I take no pride in its nonsense any more than my own. I am knitted up in its thriving. <\/p>\n\n