Take It or Leave It

It is a take it or leave it sort of fruit, the pineapple. To some it is almost as repulsive as a durian or a Swedish rotten herring. I marvel at it. I eye them up carefully in the shop, looking for them to lose that greenness in the skin and for the leaves to look a tiny bit tired. Like melons, I turn them over and smell the bases, waiting until the aroma becomes quite strong. I have the same sort of awed respect for the pineapple as the eighteenth-century landowners who built greenhouses for their propagation and installed stone pineapples on their walls and parapets as a status symbol for the envy of their neighbours.