Weird fruit / the medlar tree

I have had a duvet day today, but managed to get out in the garden to top up the bird feeders and take a few shots when the sun popped out. What I really wanted to do was go out for a long walk, but the part of me that is feeling over-stretched told me to stay put.

And so I did. Even watched 'Rebecca', Hitchcock's first Hollywood film, with the splendidly obsessive figures of Mrs Danvers and her oleaginous sidekick Jack, Rebecca's cousin and lover. I'd been trying to put aside time to watch this film, and listen to an audiobook, for several days, and today was the day. I read a few chunks of a kindle book too, so it was a very technological-gizmo sort of day, with the bed as a kind of boat bobbing in a sea of gadgets of varying degrees of beauty and desirability ( iPad and camera are winning on shininess and goodlooks; kindle and TV are clunky, dull and charmless by comparison). And for all those who commented on the apparently pink laptop in yesterday's rainbow blip, I hasten to reassure you that it is actually white! The cat, on the other hand, is usually chartreuse.

Enough rambling! We have a tree to look at. This is our medlar, which CleanSteve planted a few years ago, because it reminded him of a tree his family had had during his boyhood in Surrey. I was a bit sad. because a flowering cherry got chopped down in the process, but the medlar is more unusual. It produces strange fruits, which have to be left on the tree to rot, aka 'blet' and then they are picked and left to blet some more indoors, after which time they can be eaten with a teaspoon, a bit like eating a passion fruit, only not as nice! Last year I gave them to a friend who is keen on making jams and preserves; the year before, we left them to blet on the tree for ages, then a deer/fox/badger swiped them overnight!
They taste a bit like quinces, a taste I have never been keen on, and indeed the medlar is related to the quince tree. Goodness knows what we will do with them this year: it's been a rubbish year for apples, but the medlars are forming...

CleanSteve blipped a medley of medlars here:

Short film about the famous song, Strange Fruit, which is about a more serious subject than medlars.