Chapter Fourty-One: Strawberries and Cream (~jinghan)

I slid my lips over the left-over strawberry that had been put in the fridge because I hadn’t eaten it last night. (It was too cold to bite into. Duh.)

And I expected to come away with cream on my lips. At least I was so goddamned sure that I tasted cream that I licked my lips.

There was no cream.

Lets be honest, if taste-buds were people they’d be pretty un-refined people. They’re prejudiced, greedy, over indulgent and selfish. And I’m sure some of those adjective overlap. But I found their weak spot – nostalgia. It’s like finding out you can make the big tough boy at school cry by saying something simple and innocent that triggers some overwhelming memory of his.

Oh wait wait, back up. I think you totally got something wrong back there. When I said cream, I didn’t mean the thick milky sort that comes in a tub that says “pure cream” or “thickened cream” or “double cream” or “please-buy-me-because-I-have-inserted-a-desperate-adjective-here cream”. (No really, YOU try and find a tub of cream that just says “cream” and nothing shopper-enticingly more.) I meant the whipped up and somewhat over-sweetened and then chilled a bit so that it feels slightly congealed sort of cream that’s slathered on too thickly on the outside of a sponge cake and decorated with fruit in a half-hearted attempt to seem less unhealthy.

And that’s where the strawberry comes in. There’s something about last-night’s strawberry refrigerated that has exactly the same flavour as those buried in cream and left in a cake shop fridge overnight strawberries. Which is a pretty crap taste if you asked a completely uninvolved third party. But somehow it also tastes of birthday yum-chas with the extended family from before the time I was old enough or brave enough to suggest a different choice of cake to my mother. It tastes of memory.

Here is a picture of a kilo of Vegemite. (It’s flipped because webcams do their thing, so that you can use it as a mirror and fix up your hair while talking to someone on Skype.)

Lets be honest Vegemite is one of those things that tastes like crap without nostalgia. No one says “OMG YUM” if they just went out and tried Vegemite on their own. And heck, lets be really honest, most of the time they say “OMG YUK”. But then one day I was hanging out with my friend at her family holiday house in Sorento and she said – “you just never had it right, you need it made with love.” So she made me a slice of toast with Vegemite.

And then I fell in love.

So 1 kilo of Vegemite is going for a trip to California.

Now I just have to fit every other thing that I can’t bare to leave behind in the other 22kg allowance I have for my suit case. (In case you’re thinking: my boyfriend weighs more than that.)