Wizened

The farm stall was selling the final few of their last season's apples and I bought some. You have to admire their endurance.  They made a very nice cobbler mixed with some of my last year's blackcurrants from the freezer.
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Wizened apples have a certain resonance for me. They remind me of the first job I had after graduating. It wasn't exactly what I wanted; in fact I had been offered a post working for Jane Goodall studying chimpanzees in Africa but that would have meant being away for 2 years and my father was ailing. I felt I needed to stick around to spend time with him and to support my mother. So I took a job working for an  archaeologist, illustrating Anglo-Saxon pottery for his life work, a compendium of all the pots that had been found in Britain.

 I spent the next two years working in the spare bedroom of the academic and his wife, Dr and Mrs M., in an old manor house in a village just outside Oxford. Their life style was simple, even austere and harked back to the pre-war era.

I had no training as an archaeological draughtsperson but Dr M. and I agreed on some basic conventions and I bought a Rotring pen. I was mainly working from pencil sketches he had made over the course of his life although he did send me off to visit a few museums. 

I worked from 10 till 6. At 11am Mrs M. brought me a cup of coffee and two biscuits and at 3.30pm a  cup of tea and ditto, or sometimes a piece of shop cake.  There was a bookcase filled with old novels in the bedroom and while there I read the entire works of Dorothy Sayers. 

Dr M. an erudite, silver-bearded academic, set off for his college on his upright bike, dressed in a morning coat, but usually returned for lunch which followed a formal pattern. The three of us would sit round a polished table, nicely laid, to share what could only be described as a meagre repast. There would always be Mrs M's homemade bread, brown and white, and simple fare. Often it would consists of tiny scraps of cold meat left over from the Sunday joint or other small remnants of (presumably) their supper dishes -  typically English items such as cottage pie. Mrs M., who had been a Cambridge blue stocking, wasn't a great cook and I don't think they had a fridge but nothing was ever wasted and we ate it as respectfully as if it were haute cuisine.

Anyway, to get to the point, Dr and Mrs M. only ate what fruit and veg they grew themselves. So, when it was in season it appeared on the table and when it wasn't, it didn't. Tomatoes and lettuce in the summer, cabbage and kale in the winter. They were however very proud of their apple crop and especially of the variety that, with careful storage, stayed edible  until around this time of year - almost up until the arrival of the first rhubarb.
The apples were however very wizened but I remember them and their growers with affection.