Three things

sovay gave me three things to write about!

Durian

I have never eaten durian! I have eaten durian-flavoured things, none particularly impressive or likely true to the original, and when I was living in Sydney I used to eye up the durians at the local fruit store, intrigued by their backstory and their hedgehoggy, pine cone appearance - but I was flatting with a German woman who was fastidiously neat and would cry if I put things the wrong way up on the dish draining board or didn’t polish the taps, and I didn’t think I could get away with bringing one home. I do miss the ready availability of tropical fruit in Sydney; mainly boxes of mangoes, but also lychees, rambutan and mangosteens. I can get these occasionally here but they’re expensive and not as high quality (ditto custard apple/soursop/cherimoya). I am currently eating an indifferent persimmon, but the tamarillos in my garden are ripe (see icon).

Backscratchers

We had one of those metal hand-shaped ones when I was a child, and my sister and I would menace each other with it. I’ve never been a huge fan of back scratching, but my daughter loves it and will demand it when she’s having problems sleeping (she also spends a lot of time being a cat and demanding skritches, so it may be related).

Vintage cars

I am more of a modern car person and drive an all electric Nissan Leaf. I have a first cousin once removed in the UK, who loves Morgans and collects them, along with vast quantities of books; he is an architect and has a purpose-built garage-library, at least half of which I deeply envy. But two childhood books that meant a lot to me feature vintage cars - Peter Dickinson’s The Weathermonger, where the child leads drive a 1909 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost through an England that has become hostile to technology, and Bruce Carter’s Speed Six!, where three enterprising young men who own an ailing garage enter Le Mans with their vintage Bentley. I loved this when I was ten or so and really should re-read it; it made me want to take up vintage car racing for a short period of time (I used to be rather impressionable in this regard and in fact planned on being a traffic analyst for some months after finishing John Brunner’s The Squares of the City). I think I do have his Perilous Descent at my parents’ place, I think, in which two shot-down English airmen (Carter was in the RAF) discover an entrance to a strange underground world.