Well we’ve done the all things bright and beautiful religious bashing bit and we’ve done the immoral greedy bankers and overpaid footballers bit. We’ve done the elf and safety and the nanny state, (might get back to that one sometime) riots and rampant crime, immigration, corruption and politicians, and sex of various sorts, surely there must be something else to talk about?

Well of course, once again it is the fig season and it must be a whole year since I mentioned that so most people, if not all, will have forgotten and I can repeat myself with no qualms. Our one fig tree bearing edible fruit is a winter fig so the fruit won’t be ripe until the end of the year. The one we thought would be ripe for the picking at this moment in time as they say turns out to be a male and the fruit inedible so it is destined for the chopper (or the chain saw) as it is taking up too much space next to one of the walnuts and crowding it a bit. The walnuts are coming along nicely by the way. We still have sacks of the buggers from previous years but I reckon most of them will burn nicely in the zompa this winter. We’ve also lost one of the pines, due to old age I reckon, and that will chop up nicely for firewood only we need to get someone in who knows what they doing to fell it. It is a very large old tree and if we attempted playing at being woodsmen one of us would probably end up in accident and emergency so better safe than sorry. Also the nectarine that American friends gave us some years ago is for the chop. It has never born fruit but every year breaks out in peach curl no matter what we do to try and eradicate it. We’ve sprayed it with enough chemicals to create a hole in the ozone layer and accelerate global warming so before more damage is done to the environment, down it comes. In its place will go the loquat I planted from seed, that is a pip from our already established tree, and which is already a good eighteen inches high. In fact I planted half a dozen in a pot but this is the only one that has survived. Touch wood it will continue to do so as it is one of my favourite fruits and I might just live long enough to enjoy it.

But back to the figs. Even though we have no tree of our own, our neighbour Eleftheria has sent over so many the fruit drawer in the fridge is packed with them, enormous and, like Mister Kipling’s cakes, exceedingly tasty. So it is fig ice-cream, fig jam, fig tart, fig slices and fig chutney making time.

More than likely in the previous Blog when I talked about the figs, I probably mentioned the fact that in previous years, during the fig season prisoners were put on half rations and the figs were meant to make up the deficit. All I can say is I hope they had good toilet facilities which somehow I very much doubt.

There will be a good crop of pomegranates this year as well, that is if Mister Ratty doesn’t get to them first. He loves pomegranates. We will have to put up an old CD or two to frighten him off. We did that with the grape vine and it worked. The oranges too are yielding a bumper crop, ready for Christmas. And that’s quite enough fruit talk for today. You would think I had nothing better to go on about.