DEAR MOTHER

I’ve finally arrived in England. The journey wasn’t too bad. My crate was pretty full and the sea was a bit choppy but I am all right. I’ve landed up in Chelsea which is a posh part of London. So don’t worry about me. But it’s nothing like what I expected. Do you remember when you and I were looking at an article on fruit bowls in the Clementine Clarion? I expected to be cosily huddled together with some other clementines and oranges and the odd lemon in a pretty glazed china bowl on a solid dining table, perhaps within sniffing distance of a vase of flowers, like those photos we were looking at. But this is weird. I was sitting minding my own business on some fake grass on a market stall when I was bought by the artist Allegra Belisher-Flent who makes highly individual objects to support one individual fruit. She took me into her studio and perched me on a bendy clump of blue plasticine which balances on an amorphous lump of something black, I think. Next to me, a banana is poised on a green cube dipped in a bowl of pink jelly. I have a price tag of £250 which is pretty outrageous considering my limited life span. Unless I get eaten soon, which we were told at school is our natural destiny, my leaves will wrinkle and fall off, my firm skin will go flabby and lose its colour and my body is doomed to become really rather horrid. Still, I shall go to clementine heaven knowing that I was valued at £250. Not many clementines can make that claim, can they?

All my love,

Clemmie.