A Love Letter to Citrus Fruits
Sometimes, winter feels like a film shot on pale, desaturated stock. There's no sunrise at dawn, just an almost imperceptible lightening of the leaden sky. Londoners combat the cold in dark hooded coats, a huddled monochromatic mass, and the stone grey of the city seems to permeate everything.
But nature, in her infinite brilliance, has the perfect antidote - it's citrus season.
It's too much to expect them to survive the cement skied chill of the British winter, but citrus trees love southern Europe, so their fruits arrive here without too heavy a carbon footprint. And when they come, the murky muted morning turns to technicolour.
The first sensory pleasure is visual - even the plump, jewel-bright peel of oranges, lemons, grapefruits and limes is an effective antidote to the winter gloom, and the fruit within is luminous - Mediterranean sunshine condensed into succulent flesh. Then there's the smell - a clean, sharp, floral zestiness that slices through the gloom and sets the tongue tingling. The taste, perfectly sweet in clementines, face-puckeringly sour in lemons, cuts through the bland flavours of winter like a razor.
When my grandfather was a naughty little boy in a northern mining town, he would stand with his friends sucking lemons in front of the colliery band, causing the musicians to salivate and falter. Even reading the word 'lemon' makes your mouth, quite literally, water. White the other citrus fruits don't stimulate the salival glands in quite the same way, their scent similarly stirs the senses. To smell a lime is to crave its tangy taste.
Researchers in Chicago found that the scent of grapefruit induced feelings of happiness, and lab mice under pressure have been found to relax under the calming aroma of lemon. For humans, the associations of summer afternoons in Mediterranean gardens and the mellifluous slide of a hot toddy down a sore throat make the smell even more soothing.
The best way to endure the winter may be to embrace the cold darkness and atavistic urge to sleep, but when you need something to snap you out of the gloom, something citrus will do the trick.