A fruit bowl. Photograph: Martin Godwin
If we believe the food nazis we British are a nation of salad dodgers - lusters after flesh, bingers on fried starch but only consuming vegetable matter at the point of a gun - which makes it all the more odd that this week we simply can't shut up about fruit.
My own poor attempt at criticism of the government's five-a-day scheme was soon knocked into touch by a hitherto unexposed cabal of online fruit-lobbyists. Susan Smillies's critique of the orange provoked positively rabid reaction.
And suddenly everybody's at it. Andy Murray, evidently a tennis player, has weighed into the debate with his own perspicacious observations on the blameless banana ... "Players sit there and eat them at changeovers, but it can't be to give them energy because they take ages to digest," he says in his new autobiography. "To be honest, I think bananas are a pathetic fruit." And now our future king, never one to leave an opinion unexpressed, is rushing to the support of an apple.
Well sod it, if that's how everyone feels, it's obviously open season on fruit so I'm going to declare my lust for the quince. The heavy, decadent fragrance, the waxen-skin, the indecent crepuscular paleness all conspire to make a fruit fit for the lips of a phthisic, Arthurian princess in the most mawkish of pre-Raphaelite paintings. I love quince in all its forms, pastes, jams, cheeses and membrillos. It reminds me of ginger-haired girls and death.
Kiwi fruit, on the other hand, are shite.
Great, isn't it? There's no need to be shy anymore. We can stroll over to the fruit bowl right now and feel no British reserve ... no need to hold back, to stiffen our upper lips or suppress our emotion ... damn it in a great outpouring we can lay bare our feelings and declare to the whole world the fruits we love or hate.
