Thoughts on Seeing a Photo of a Peach
I published my thoughts on the environment and climate change nearly twenty years ago as the penultimate chapter of my non-fiction book ‘Engaging Politics?’, so I am not normally surprised by what is going on with our climate. Nor am I, if I am honest, surprised by the lack of action from our political leaders and other elites. But it was something as ordinary as a piece of fruit that brought me up short recently.
Maybe, when I first saw the photo, I didn’t take on board what was going on. You see, fifty-five years ago, as a small boy, I was allowed to pick a peach, and eat it. The old gardener, Mr Hemmings, will be dead by now; but he tended those peach trees almost as if they were his children, and we – that’s me, my sister and brother – would occasionally be granted permission to wander around the greenhouses, the heady scent of the tropics in our noses and, by the time we left, we’d have warm peach juice trickling down our chins.
Of course, our mother would then instantly demand hands and faces were washed, and worry that we’d ‘spoiled our dinner.’ Not that I ever recall our youthful appetites being much diminished by our peach-eating. And, as Mr Hemmings made sure we only ate ripe fruit, there were no tummy upsets either (if there had been, I’m sure our visits to the greenhouses would have been curtailed on the instant).
However, to return to this photograph my friend sent me: I had not taken on board was where the peach was being eaten. I saw the name of the city where my friend was staying, and assumed they were ‘down under.’ After all, at least a third of Australia is tropical, and on a world map, Perth is (more or less) as far south of the equator as Casablanca is north of that same imaginary line. However, Perth, Australia, will be in winter just now, so probably not peach season.
My friend was in Perth, Scotland. Seriously north. Seriously not the place I would have expected anyone to be plucking ripe peaches from the tree while wandering in a garden. My childhood summer holidays, half a century ago, took place in Cornwall. One of the warmest places (we’d have said ‘tropical’ at the time) in England, and the house belonged to our mother’s aunt – who used it as a holiday home. Now, given the extent of the greenhouses, I imagine a lot of the fruit and other produce would be sent to Great-Auntie Betty’s place in London; but at the time, those thoughts were not part of our holiday thinking. As children, we just enjoyed our fortnight in the sunshine, frolicking on the lawns, chasing through the woods, and swimming off the private beach.
In those days, in order to eat home-grown peaches, you needed to live on the south coast of England and have a large greenhouse. Now? It seems you can wander around a garden in Scotland, and pick your peaches from a tree. And that can be done a whole month before they would have ripened in the Cornish greenhouse in the 1970s.
Please don’t tell me there’s no such thing as climate change. While it might be nice to be able to wander around a garden in far northern climes to pick fruit, fruit that would have been considered exotic, ‘Mediterranean’ or tropical half a century previously, it isn’t right. Not least because, for so many people, what was pleasant is now boiling hot; what was fruitful is now drought; and what was considered an academic theory is now all too brutal reality.