How To Observe A Fig

A step-by-step guide (& recipe!)

The writer’s block begins on Monday.

A long-brewing heatwave finally bubbles over. Pubescent bedroom mould clogs me solid. Swarms of mosquitos confidently tuck into my shoulders. Dill pickles betray their vows in the fridge. No red lentils remain - I’ll have to settle for puy.

Ugh.

My only friend is 5am. Holy, witchy hour.

Shaped like worship and painted in psychedelia, it beckons me. I tentatively creep out of my tomby shadows. As the sunrise perceives me, I scramble, I sprint - possessed. I dance with her.

I dunk my feet in the fountain’s harmonies. Blood - the rush attacks my toes. The ground turns mulchy. The city feels safe under the maternal gaze of dawn. I float through her, hungry to drink in every inch of this hour on the brink of transgression.

When the heat mounts and 5am is slurped up by its successor, the delirium creeps in. I watch the climbing sun with a vegetal gaze, dragging the weight of my saturated body across the now-brittle battlefield. I bury my head in decaying darkness once more, wading through thick shadow – the only path to relief.

My soft arms are turned a harsh piggy pink from the now-volatile sun. I think of my rosy Ganni scarf buried at the bottom of my wardrobe. Helplessly folded in on itself. A marshmallow.

I weep for my forgotten cotton.

I hate summer.

I sip some water. A new, necessary habit.

The tennis is on. It saves me a little.

Tommy Paul, Ben Shelton, the feline Taylor Fritz. On my turf. In white. Sleeveless, at times. They beckon me further out of my shell, tag-teaming with the morning’s witchy flag.

A flush of motivation follows a particularly inspired 148mph serve.

I decide I need blue nails. I promptly follow through.

Observing my newly decked-out fingertips, clarity rails me before I know it. I am transformed the second the topcoat dries.

A neon knowing sets me alight: with these here sparkly fingers, I am to make jam.

I pause for another sip of water.

Which fruit? I hear you ask.

I am only able to consider my options in the light of morning clarity, so the decision waits until Tuesday.

Eventual reflections: peach jam is tangy, apricot jam is second to too many, plum jam is distinct but thin, strawberry jam makes me homesick. Raspberry jam? Wishful thinking.

Logically, inevitably, my mind turns to Fig.

Fig.

I realise it has been almost one year since I faced a fresh fig. I need to approach it slowly. Reverently. To learn it again from scratch.

I write this guide over a string of sessions spent curled up under the tongue of 5am, where everything is translucent.

What I will go on to write may start to twist and twirl. See this as proof that I’ve lingered too long. I’ve let the sun rummage through my brain, sunburn my sanity. That’s when the madness takes the pen from me. Summertime psychosis.

You’ll know when it happens. I encourage you to stay with me anyway.

With this warning - here is my step-by-step guide on how to observe a fig.

1. Find your fig

There are so many ways.

Sylvia P comes to mind. Plath.

‘I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked…I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.’

It is decadent and tragic. The fig tree. The image.

I stand with the ghost of Sylvia P, and all those versions of myself I could have become. It’s not their first time joining me for 5am worship.

They died so I didn’t have to. They died for my sins.

Through the words of Sylvia P - lush, cruel, hypnotic - through her devastating ruin and talent, she carved a path straight to my feet. Etched in that path are clear instructions, in a script only I can read. I’ve followed it barefoot throughout my life. Felt the leftover coals bite my soles. Peered into her ovens. Traced her outline in ash.

Because of her, I know I must pick the fig. It all ends the same anyway. Ashes to ashes. We will all go plop! whether we starve in indecision or rot, sticky-chinned.

I would rather meet decay sugar-coated.

So I grab the first fig I see. Bite down hard (eventually). Let it rot if it so wishes.

Just find your fucking fig.

2. Feel your fig

Take the fig in your palm.

I was lucky enough to be born with a birthmark on my left hand - a tiny altar for encounters exactly like this. In many ways, taste begins here: not with the tongue, but in the trembling contact of skin, in the way we let the world seep through our seams.

The fig is warm from the counter. It has been pierced by the same mosquito that once feasted on me.

My blood and fig blood float above me now, pooled in one menacing little belly. Already, we’re entangled. Already, I’m contaminated. Already, there’s a silent oath binding us.

Press your thumb into it. Let it dent. Feel how the fig remembers you. Dr Nicola Perullo, food philosopher (and my quasi namesake) would describe this as a haptic task – taste as a correspondence, an agreement to be altered.

Find the fig’s neck. If it’s tougher than your own throat, accept that you’ve met your maker.

When the sap leaks, don’t wipe it away too quickly. How you handle that ooze becomes a narrative that is only yours to pen.

Taste is not a sterile knowing, but a dark mutuality. A dance of skin and spoil. This is taste’s true script - written in sap, in skin, in soft decay.

3. Open your fig

You could reach for a knife, if you want a clinical cut.

But I would urge you to use your thumb. Feel the leathery skin split under the fleshy pressure. Like secrets spilling out of a pulsing, adored heart.

a pulsing, adored heart if I ever caught one

Brace yourself – the seeds you are about to see, I can only compare them to a hedgehog’s bristles. Dead and sap-streaked, harsh yet comforting. Abundance laced with grief.

Study the tiny rubies hidden in their messy nests. Watch how they wink through the folds of bruised pink. Each one a tooth is from a different mouth you have tasted. How they glisten through folds of memory, of deep pink flesh.

Think of your scarf, forgotten and faintly perfumed. Your arms, still sizzling from the sun. The fig will show you the rot and rawness you’ve been hiding.

That is the tenderness. The rot is the reason it’s sweet at all. This is how the fig keeps its promises.

4. Appreciate your fig

I understand that the fig can be a horrifying sight. A monster with too many eyes. It’s okay, sweetheart. It’s more afraid of you than you are of it.

terrified, rotting, glorious

Hold it open in your palm, half alive, half rotting. See how the edges already curl black? This is the part you can’t ignore. This is where the fig proves itself a living thing, where life and death press so close together you can hardly tell them apart. Just like the blurry moments between 5 and 6 am.

At this point, maybe you’ll start to feel like it could eat you first. That’s normal. Listen to how I’m speaking to you now – typing from the thick of summer delirium, caught in a chokehold by my tough-necked counterpart. My meaning-making mind can’t help stuffing stories into everything, turning a fig into a map of my own rot and longing.

Sylvia P might have starved rather than risk this. I praise you, Sylvia P. Rest easy, out of harm’s way. I understand why you didn’t choose this.

But from possession comes clarity. I know 5am will arrive again.

So, be gentle with your fig. Apologise if you need to. You’re asking a lot of it, to hold all your projections. Your lonely scarf, your sunburned arms, your small, hidden bruises.

And still - be grateful. The fig stayed long enough to open for you.

5. Reflect on the fig / decide against making jam

The fig feels like the very culmination of this heatwave - swollen, flawed, ready to fold in on itself. Maybe that’s why it frightens me more than the mould in my room ever could. It knows too much.

The morning hours helped me see it clearly: how we need the dark to breed sweetness, the light to expose it. How taste is not just pleasure, but the risk of letting something else seep into you, rewriting your story in sap and stain.

I think of the pickles that betrayed me, the mosquito that stitched my blood to the fig’s. But the fig never breaks its vow - it decays with exquisite honesty, drawing me right along with it.

By now, you might be thinking of making jam. I was.

Jam is a tidy solution - a way to trap excess in a glossy jar, to keep your toast civilised, your fruit obedient and true.

But the fig is too unruly for that. Too pulpy with its own dark thoughts. Too eager to remind me that decay is the source of every sweetness.

Better to taste it raw. Let it burst.

Moral

I hate summer. It drives me fucking insane.

Epilogue: tomato jam

I couldn’t round off this post without seeing my jam journey through – what a tragedy to waste my freshly glossed nails so.

Tomato is my safe fruit - meant to be tamed. I had fresh ricotta in the fridge. My hands were tied (and gleaming).

Step 1: chop your tomatoes!

tomatoes, early chop

Step 2: put them on the hob, low and slow!

I highly doubt your stove is much cleaner. don’t watch it.

Step 3: after a few hours, they’ll slump into something jammy

jam/nail comparison. essential

Step 4: eat how you wish

multigrain cracker shard, fresh ricotta, tomato jam

Step 5: reflect