December, Definitely Winter

The TV is showing blizzards in the north and warning of force ten gales; the mountains are capped in snow, there are white horses on the usually calm waters of the Gulf and the windows shudder in the wind. And it's citrus season. Even though satsumas are your traditional bottom-of-Christmas-stocking fruit, there's something incongruous about seeing the trees in town laden with bright lemons, oranges, grapefruit and mandarins at this time of year. These are juicy, refreshing, colourful fruits and you should have them in summer, dammit! Someone screwed up there.

(Quick digression: in Greek, as in every other language I know of, the words for orange the fruit and orange the colour are the same. I imagine the colour came first, so presumably every society had this conversation: 'What shall we call these orange things?' 'Er, oranges?' 'Bingo!' It's like those towns you get called 'Newtown', which must have been founded by the most deadeningly unoriginal people. I've only visited one Newtown, in mid-Wales, and it was quite possibly the worst place I have ever been to (and this is coming from someone who once lived in Peterborough). We were only there for half an hour to stop off at the supermarket, and five years later it's still seared on my memory. I can't say why, exactly - just something in the atmosphere, the legacy, I suppose, of those idiot founding fathers who couldn't come up with a proper name. Avoid the place, and, I suggest, all other Newtowns. And if anyone knows a language where 'orange' and 'orange' are different, please let me know.)

There are trees in the streets, and everybody has some in their garden (or, more usually, in the patch of wasteland surrounding their apartment block. This ain't suburbia as we know it). This means they practically give the stuff away in the grocer's. There's too much for anyone's purposes. Fruit falls from the trees and rots in the gutter. I no longer feel guilty about scrumping the odd lemon.

Lemons are best when they're still green - the fragrance of a fresh lemon is something wonderful, transforming a glass of water or a gin and tonic. They're a big ingredient in Greek cuisine - fish, fried cheese, cabbage, salad, all are served with a lemon on the side. If you leave them on the tree, they grow gangrenous and swell to the size of large oranges. I'm not sure what they taste like then.

Grapefruits are known in Greek by the English name, which seems puzzling. Did the Greeks not have their own word? Maybe they were just known as 'Off-yellows' or something (the word 'yellow' in Greek is citron. Do I have the basis of a thesis here?) And what's the connection between grapefruit and the fruit, grape? Whatever, they grow huge, and I think the people who park their cars under grapefruit trees are unwise.

The exciting news is that, to cope with the citrus supply, I bought a juicer this week, and we've been enjoying freshly-squeezed orange juice and homemade lemonade, which is lovely, but would be so much more appropriate in the summer. As I remember, the citrus season lasts until spring, stopping just as the weather starts getting hot. (I'm being unfar on the weather, actually. Before it started snowing, it was gorgeous. I was sunbathing on the roof and walking round in a T-shirt. Getting strange looks from the locals in their winter coats, admittedly.)

It's not a great juicer, in fact it's the cheapest one there was, but it works, after a fashion. This is one of the problems of living the itinerant life we do (the fact that we have next to no money is separate issue). Every item we acquire pushes us a little further over the 20 kilo baggage allowance into which we must squeeze our lives at the end of the year. So we buy the cheapest juicer, to go with the cheapest stereo (which is fine for Bonnie Prince Billy but doesn't do justice to the Flaming Lips) and the cheapest frappe maker (which manages to create a layer of bubbles on top of your coffee, but hardly the solid froth-you-can-stand-your-straw-up-in which a good frappe demands).

It's a natural instinct, I think, to want to make a nest, to carve out your own territory (and then fill it with elegant stainless-steel juicers and expensive stereo equipment). There's a struggle in all of us between our wanderlust and the craving for settled security; between wanting to explore every corner of the world and wanting to find that corner we can call our own, our home; between playing the field and geographical monogamy.

Living like this, for a few months in different places, is a good compromise. You get deeper into a place, you live with it, it's not just another stop on the tour. Your pictures have stories and people and feelings behind them, they're not just the backdrop to your MTV video existence.

On the other hand, like all compromises, it's not quite satisfying; it's neither one thing nor the other. The attachments you form are transitory, you're not putting any deep roots down, and you don't have your whole CD collection with you. Yet you soon fall into routines, day-to-day dullnesses. The speed with which human beings adjust to new experiences is incredible, and a little sad.

I have to remind myself from time to time: look, there are snow-capped mountains on the horizon. There are orange trees growing in the streets. You don't get that in Newtown.