Biting down into a strawberry, my mouth fills with memories. The juice of long summer days playing out with my friends, when the sun never seemed to set. The flesh of freshly cut grass and Wimbledon finals. I had forgotten this taste, it has been years since I have embodied summers past, tasted them, swallowed them down, held them in my belly. It stops me in my tracks. I have to sit down, bite into more, live in these moments a little longer.
I bought the punnet of strawberries from one of the many fresh fruit and veg stalls on the street where I am staying. The greengrocer from my childhood, way across London, shut up shop decades ago, swallowed up by the unstoppable tsunami of high street supermarkets. The bakery and butcher went soon after. Nowadays, at least in the area of London where I am staying, small shops with fresh produce spilling out onto the street, have made a welcome and colourful return to the high street. I bought the strawberries on my second day in London, enticed by the warm sun and their plump, rosy bodies. I wasn’t aware I would be biting into a time machine that would transport me back to when I learnt the names of all the apples from a big, illustrated poster in the greengrocer’s shop (granny smith, red delicious and cooking apples, the only options I remember back then).
I have eaten an abundance of strawberries in my 12 years in Mexico, bought in half kilos from the market, transported home in bags overflowing with mangos, papaya, prickly pears and watermelon. It turns out, though, I hadn’t realised that Mexican strawberries taste different to the ones I grew up with. Upon reflection, Mexican strawberries are often darker in colour, a richer burgundy skin compared to the pinky red of the UK ones. Their skin is also tougher, almost imperceptibly so, but tougher nonetheless, as if they know they need to survive transportation across long distances and high temperatures to arrive at bustling markets. And the taste, well just like with grapes grown for Mexican wine, strawberries have a slight hint of chili, a transference from the abundant crop grown in Mexican soils. You may think me crazy, like those wine buffs who tell you a wine has hints of chocolate and walnut, when all you can taste is…red wine, but I stand by it. Mexican strawberries have a hint of chilli in the same way British ones have a hint of freshly cut grass. No strawberry is better or worse than the other, but only one, it seems, holds my childhood locked within its flesh.
I bite into another strawberry, it tastes of nostalgia, longing for a place that never truly existed, but through that pinky flesh, those soft yellow seeds, I get to live there for a few moments, indulge in the comfort of childhood made prettier in hindsight.
I recently came across a quote by Alain de Botton, that says “Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.”
I think this quote offers so much richness for us writers. Just as in my last newsletter I showed the importance of a ‘place’ to jog a memory, now the strawberries have shown the transformative nature of taste. When writing memory, we too get to call on all the senses. Memories aren’t things we just see a slide show of in our minds, we often live them viscerally too, for better or for worse. So as writers we can call on tastes, smells, sounds to transport our characters, and write memories that are richly embodied. And we get to show how sometimes memories land with a soft haze that smooths off the rougher edges…not always, but sometimes.
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A few things I have enjoyed recently…
Music: I went to Notting Hill Carnival a couple of weekends ago and we ended up dancing for ages at a soundsystem playing Amapiano. This was a new genre of music for me and I loved it. This mini documentary shows how this new-to-me genre emerged in the 2010s and has evolved.
A Novel Extract: I shared a short extract from my novel ON SOLID GROUND on Instagram. Thank you to all who left comments and likes.
Podcast: I love Esther Perel’s Podcast Where Should We Begin. Each episode is a one-off couple’s therapy sessions. I find them fascinating and insightful and, as a writer who is often writing about how people relate (or don’t), it can feel like research.
Newsletter: I love
’s poetry and her newsletter this week spoke to my heart. In Being A Woman on the Internet, she shares the woes but propels us to “Grow rowdy [and] Get read.”
Of all the senses, for me, taste is the hardest to write. I felt those strawberries, though--I’ve eaten the Mexican and Californian berries but there’s nothing like the tiny ones I get in Maine every June.
i live in western new york and for myself, strawberries are synonymous with the first day of summer vacation ~ waking up at sunrise and picking quart after quart with my mother. Mouths full, hands stained red.
To this day, I only eat strawberries in season.