Turns out that the mystery tree outside my window is a loquat tree. The fruit are annoyingly just out of reach, but I bought some in the supermarket: they are called nèfles (japonaise) in French, and it was strange to eat them because as soon as I tasted them I remembered that me and my brother gorged on wild loquats in Australia once; I think we ate so many that we got diarrhoea. The taste is hard to describe: something like tart apricots. Ellen, with her freakish knowledge of French idioms, knew that nèfles used to mean nothing of value: colloquially you could say, for example, ‘avoir quelque chose pour des nèfles’. But that nèfle was the medlar, which is nothing like as nice as a loquat, and is also called a ‘cul de chien’, so fair enough.
My other favourite food related idioms, since we’re here:
‘Tomber dans les pommes’: to fall in the apples: to faint
‘Poser un lapin’: to place a rabbit: to stand someone up
‘Avoir des oursins dans les poches’: to have sea urchins in the pockets: to be stingy
Corsican strawberries are in season too: I find it odd to eat them with loquats in May when to me they mean high summer, cream and meringues.
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