Having a Frog Hollow Farm plum which is Proustian-madeleining me back to the tree in front of the house I lived in in primary school, which had done nothing for the first few years we lived there but be a really good-lookin' tree that was nice to read under, and then all of a sudden one summer exploded with plums, adult-fist-sized, psychotically juicy, so much so as to defy physics, and sweet, I mean Jolly Rancher sweet, with skin that wasn't leathery and tart but tissue-soft and also sweet, so purple it looked black in the shade, with matching flesh. It was Narnia-like to see this object, which had so long just let us sit there thinking it was an ordinary tree, suddenly start spilling hitherto-unimagined gems with such profligate abandon.

Slate, about Pimm's straight: "It is as if a quantity of fresh mulch has doused an insurance fire at a candied-orange factory — inside your mouth." Reminds of Burgess' dead-on observation that eating durian "is like eating vanilla custard in a latrine."