Comparing Apples

I went recently – and for the first time – to New England, so named by the English Puritans who colonised that part of America in 1620. When they landed, they found the natives friendly – but that was before immigration was tightened: these days, visitors are allowed only after having their hand-prints recorded and their retinas scanned. Still, they let me in and I set about looking for comparisons with the original England. I found few, which is unsurprising considering that almost 400 years that have elapsed since the settlers pitched their tents. There are, however, some indelible traces of the old country: the map appears to have had most of England’s place-names scattered randomly over its surface. It includes a Manchester, as well as a Manchester-by-the-Sea, which, having seen the film, one simply had to visit. The first few days, however, were spent in Boston, where I discovered that Harvard University is in Cambridge.

In part I was reminded of Australia, where the scale of the land is similarly at odds with the imported traditions of its colonists and huge vehicles ply vast distances to connect people with facilities. There are, however, some things the two Englands hold in common, one of which is the apple season. Just before my trip, I was at an old estate in Worcestershire, attracted by the opportunity to try and to buy some of its many rare varieties of apple and, my appetite whetted, I did the same when I reached a farmers’ market in Vermont. The choice was not as extensive, but my perception that American apples are all just shiny, pumped-up globes of blandness was blown away. My prejudices against American food generally were further corrected by experiences such as a wholesome breakfast of kale fried with garlic and queso fresco (whatever that is), topped with poached eggs and accompanied by toasted sourdough. Delicious – but let down, unfortunately, by the pot of tea which, I suspect, all Americans refuse to make properly out of spite following the unpleasantness which took place in Boston Harbour in 1773.

A friend of mine once said that her ideal home would be a flat in Manchester with a sea view. I laughed but, as it turns out, this is possible – in the New World. If she moved there, however, she might be disappointed to find that Manchester-by-the-Sea is merely one of the dormitory suburbs that extend from Boston along the north shore of Massachusetts Bay and not the buzzing metropolis she would like to inhabit. The North Shore feels like a refuge, not only from the city but also from the grosser aspects of Trump’s selfish, rapacious neo-liberalism. Unsurprisingly, Trump supporters are thin on the ground in this wealthy-seeming haven of liberal overspill from Harvard, MIT and the teaching hospitals.

Returning home after my brief foray into America, I was on a train the next day to Plymouth in order to attend a family funeral. I picked up a paper to catch up on the latest in the Brexit debacle but an article concerning a revival of interest in our apple heritage seemed more interesting. Apparently, there is growing enthusiasm amongst amateurs for the resurrection and preservation of our apple varieties, determined as they are to repair the damage done by supermarkets and intensive farming. There are, incredibly, 2,200 varieties of apple already on the National Register and they estimate that a thousand more could be added. Even I flinched at the thought of tasting them all.

I arrived in Plymouth with time to spare and took a walk to the Barbican where, at the Mayflower steps, I thought of those Puritan emigrants. They must have been mightily desperate to cross the ocean in that tiny ship. My ‘long-haul’ flight dwindled to a mere jaunt in comparison.