Mandarins are being a talk I’m hearing rather surprisingly quite a lot these days here in CS. First it was at my brother’s, when he pointed at a bunch of them and said those pieces were given us by a friend of ours who buys them at an old lady’s place. I know old people are fond of buying oranges and other fruit at old local farmers’s places, but a friend of my brother’s, his same age, doing that and in addition buy them as a present, well, it’s odd. I could expect that from my grandmother, God have her in his glory, to a neighbor, but not this.

Then, yesterday, conversation with friends turned to the new year’s eve preparations (that thing that seemingly you have to painfully talk-preparing for hours) and V. said orange marketers had put forward a campaign to replace grapes with mandarins in the endearing habit of us of gulping down something synchronously to the first twelve seconds of the year. Oh yeah, count on me, my dear producers, I’m in.

Today while having dinner with my parents, mandarins were so good, so beautiful, so with so much branches and leaves attached, such a tasty fruit and the fruit that every child just loves and so comes to the rescue of all them, that I thought something has happened in this land that I’ve surely missed. Has it dawned on us eventually where our essence lies, after all these years of Valencian glamour? Forget fancy crumbling overwhelming cities, forget urban ruinous circuits, forget tailors and dresses and holy visits, and go back to our origins. In the beginning there was the mandarin.

And the pim pam pum.