Cherries are rather special as fruit goes because they crop up in so many different places: ‘popping one’s cherry’, ‘with a cherry on top’, ‘cherry picking’, ‘[loving you is] cherry pie’, and – surely the best known? – ‘feelings take up shelter in the base of my spine, sweet like a chica cherry cola’. N’est-ce pas? (That was a band called Savage Garden in the mid-nineties, in case you’re too young/old/cool to know the lyric.)
But then there’s that little game we used to play counting our cherry stones after dinner: ‘tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief’. I’d always eat enough cherries so I came out on ‘rich man’. It didn’t work. And, interestingly, there wasn’t an option for ‘no man’.
I’m possibly starting to sound like a bit of a loony now, so I’ll get on with July’s seasonal recipes…
