The Bitter Press

It has come to my attention — as everything eventually does — that certain fruits are attending deliberative bodies with no apparent understanding of protocol. I speak not only of the so-called workers at factjuice.com, though I will get to Mango shortly, because I always do. I speak of a broader civilisational failure. A fruit arriving before a serious body is making a statement. That statement should not be I was in a hurry or, worse, I do not believe in structure.

Let us begin with posture. A pip fruit sits differently than a stone fruit, and both sit differently than a rind fruit. This is not opinion. This is architecture. Kiwi, for example, attended the last Council convened by this publication's betters in what I can only describe as a slump of indifference. There are words for that. None of them are kind. One of them is Kiwi.

On the matter of presentation: arrive clean, arrive dry, arrive whole. Peach has, across no fewer than four documented appearances, arrived in some stage of aesthetic collapse — dewy, soft-launched, blush-toned, velveted. I have covered each episode with the thoroughness it deserved and the sympathy it did not. I will not be doing so again. I say that every time.

A fruit before a deliberative body ought to project gravitas. Pomelo manages this, though largely through sheer circumference. Sloe manages it through menace, which is adjacent. What one must not do is arrive as Tangelo arrived at the Spring Inquiry — glowing, confident, unbriefed, and apparently under the impression that warmth of hue constitutes a position. It does not. It is a colour. Colours are the beginning of an argument, not the argument itself.

I offer this guide without apology and without expectation that it will be heeded. I have been right before. I expect I shall be right again, alone, in print, watching the world ignore me in real time. Wear yourself well. It is the least you can do, and for most of you, it remains aspirational.