Cherries - Get 'em while you can...

Aren't cherries just a wonderfully optimistic fruit? They arrive quite suddenly, unlike the well guarded blackberries of Autumn, which just take forever to ripen and seem to do so one at a time. Cherries just appear. Reckless and post-box red, they are a bounty of equal opportunity, for birds and beings alike.

In France, cherries are not simply fruit. They are a seasonal event. A brief national orthodoxy that, for approximately three glorious weeks, has everyone smiling.

Here in Brittany, when June finally settles properly into the countryside, the cherries that quietly steal the show are generally a variety called "Burlats". The French adore Burlats in the same way they adore aged linen napkins, and crumbly stone walls. Not despite their fragility, but because of it. Burlats are actually pretty inconvenient for Big Grocery. They bruise easily, soften quickly and have an intense dislike for the back of a lorry. Supermarkets try and avoid them altogether, preferring breeds like Van, Summit and Regina - all sturdy species that have long shelf lives, love being transported and handle well. Which makes Burlats even more attractive.. they are more fruity poetry than logistically convenient. And they taste magnificent.

Burlats are ox-blood red, soft-fleshed and lusciously juicy. They arrive at French markets looking as though they were picked that very morning, by a fellow called Marcel who lives in a cottage and owns a really good ladder. They are not all the same size, or shape, or even colour.. but the French see this as positive and encouraging.

One of the things that living in France teaches you, is that the French are not obsessed around availability. The baker never looks apologetic for running out of buttery croissants. He looks smug. Non... The Frenchies are more interested in tradition and in timing. In France, when it's gone, it's gone, as my dear Mum used to say.

Tomatoes belong to summer. Oysters belong to winter. Goat cheese changes with the pasture and weather. And cherries - especially Burlats - are understood to have a brief, but spectacular window of perfection. Early June. Nobody appears especially interested in opening this window much wider. "Long lasting" is not a flavour profile in France. British and American fruit is expected to survive not only the calloused hands of its pickers, but the additional strain of cold storage, long-haul lorries, fluorescent lighting and the emotional killing fields of WinCo, Costco or Tesco for weeks on end without having a mid-(shelf)-life crisis.

And perhaps that is why French markets feel a bit different in June. There is an urgency - not quite a panic buy - but more like a determination beneath the pleasure. A quiet understanding that this particular box of splendid, will not be here next week. The French are supremely comfortable with this idea. They do not demand strawberries in January or cherries in November with the same entitlement found in other global marketplaces. They simply wait. And then, when the season finally arrives, they properly lean into it, with the gastronomic gusto of someone stealing a row boat.

Markets suddenly groan with crates of impossible reds and deep burgundies. Innocent children become sticky-faced shoplifters. Wasps appear from nowhere, like German policemen. Everyone buys slightly too many cherries just to have a few on the way home, only to arrive home with way too few. About turn..

Then, my friends, comes Clafoutis. It's the picture at the top of this article. Life is almost certainly not a bowl of cherries these days, what with Iran, Ebola and the price of Diesel, but we can take some comfort in the cakey hammock of a good Clafoutis.

Now, Clafoutis is one of those French desserts that sounds far more elevated than it actually is. Which, incidentally, is another very French quality. At its heart, Clafoutis is simply cherries baked into a soft custard-like pudding. What is not to love there, already? It's quite rustic - borderline blue collar, actually. Humble. Slightly untidy, often slightly uneven, it is the cake equivalent of cobblestones. Clafoutis is the sort of cake that someon'es Granny has been baking for 60 years, without ever needing to weigh anything, or look stuff up in a book.

And importantly, the cherry stones are left in. This horrifies the health-and-safety obsessed rest-of-the-world.. But the French are unmoved. They will not raise an eyebrow. The cherry stones, you see, add a light, almondy perfume to the custard during baking. It is not measurable to most humans. Dolphins can probably pick it up, but there would be national outrage if anyone sensible from the Ministry of Anything, tried to mix it up here. The bakers are happy, the dentists are happy. France goes to work on Monday morning. Phew..

If I end this cherry-flavoured essay with some lyrical waxing, it would be to say that cherry season in Brittany, reminds me of the transience of fleeting beauty. What joy exisits in things that don't last very long. English summers. English opening batsmen. Emma Raducanu's tennis career.

A Burlat cherry is not trying to survive six weeks in refrigerated suspension. A clafoutis is not designed to win the Cake of The Year Show. They are simply glorious for their 15 minutes of annual fame.

The older I get, (this will now be my sign off catch-phrase) the more I suspect the French understand something the rest of us keep trying to engineer our way around... Fleeting things are often the most valuable precisely because they are fleeting.

A June evening. A warm kitchen. Purple fingers. Dish towels that will never, ever look clean again. A dish of cherry clafoutis cooling effortlessly, under one of those wire meshy anti-fly things...

None of it lasts for very long..

Which is exactly why it matters.