Do I dare eat a peach?

(Well, a nectarine, in actual fact. But the temptation to quote the Best Poem in the World Ever in my entry title is perhaps too strong to resist, even when facts appear to conspire against me.)

Choir practice. A quick break between singing difficult music. Choir practice is at a troubling time: 7 until 9.15pm on a Monday night. Even leaving aside the troubling nature of the length of the practice (something irritatingly unsymmetrical about a rehearsal that lasts 135 minutes), there is still the fact that one is never, on a Monday evening, feeling particularly emotionally strong. And then there is the even more bewildering dinner conundrum.

Do you eat something small before choir, and then have dinner afterwards, late?
Or try to eat nothing before choir? (at which point you can guarantee your stomach will growl off-key and out of time during what should be a spine-tingling silence between notes)
Or do you have a sandwich for dinner before choir, and feel all full of panini during the singing, and still feel hungry when you get home?

Frankly, you can see my dilemma. So when my alto-friend-Kath and I went skipping out of the chapel for a quick break, I was staggeringly grateful when she offered me a nectarine.

"Oh, yes please." She handed me one, and I contemplated it for a moment in my hand. It was smooth-skinned, sunset-orange, blooming into a deep red, sliced into two round globes by a crescent moon divide. I drew back my teeth to bite into it.

Then I paused. "Seems… somehow wrong to eat a nectarine in chapel…" I mumbled.
Kath looked at her nectarine, then at me. "You’re right."
We hastily walked outside the chapel to bite into them. I looked at mine again, as I tried to stop juice dripping down my chin. Slurping, but still tentatively, I said, "In fact… there seems something a little bit rude about nectarines."
Another small pause. "Actually… yes."
"Not very hard-working are they? Not like your old-fashioned, hard working Granny Smith. They’re quite respectable. You can imagine eating them while you’re taking a break from work. " Granny Smith doing the washing, Victorian style. scrubbing cotton against a washboard. Pounding the dolly. Boiling sheets in a copper kettle, surrounded by steam. "Whereas nectarines…." I waved mine for effect. "Just look. Lascivious. Sensual. Perhaps that’s true of all summer fruits. They’re a bit more indolent."
Kath sucked on hers. "Yeah. Think of strawberries."
"Yup. Made to be eaten on picnics. Lying in the sun, being lazy."
"My colleague says strawberries are like nipples made of fruit. They’re a really rude shape."
"God. They are."
"Summer fruit. I’d never thought about it like that."

By this point, the twin buttocks of our nectarines had almost been consumed, so we wandered back in to finish our choir practice.