When watermelons taste like cucumber

Lately, I feel that I am forever moaning about the taste and quality of food bought from supermarkets, especially during the lockdown when even the prices have shot up!
One of my pet hates is tasteless tomatoes that are hard as snooker balls and that rot before they go soft.

A few weeks ago, I was delighted to find a batch of Moroccan tomatoes that took me back to my childhood in Algeria. For a second, I was transported back to those days when tomatoes were juicy, sweet, and soft as a strawberry. But that turned out to be a one-off. I didn’t find the same tomatoes again.

Among other fruit that are getting so disappointing are watermelons. I usually dice and keep them in a box in the fridge to have whenever I feel like snacking on something sweet.
Yesterday, I bought one that looked ok and felt ok. When I sliced it open and took a bite out, the taste was sadly that of a bland cucumber.

In North African markets, sellers are often so confident about the sweetness of their watermelons that they offer customers a small wedge of the fruit they have chosen to taste before they pay for it.

In my late teenage years, I spent two summers working as a youth leader in “colonies de vacances” which are holidays organised by state companies for their employees’ children.
Schools are usually taken over and transformed into temporary camps with classrooms serving as dormitories during the six-week holidays. 
The kids spent three weeks enjoying trips to the beach, games, sing-songs, drawing and painting. We, the youth leaders, enjoyed a paid holiday.

In the evening, after the kids were put to bed, a couple of us stayed on guard duty while the rest of us, half a dozen went out on the town. Those days, it was a tame night out free from any addictive. The strongest thing we consumed to finish the evening was a milky coffee or a minted tea.
But before that, we always started the night with a tough competition. We stopped at a watermelon seller and each chose a small fruit. The one who got the sweetest didn’t have to pay for anything all evening.

I had the knack of finding the best tasting fruit by simply placing it against my ear and squeezing it. A crackle meant it was ripe to perfection. I discarded any that didn’t sound dry.

The seller acted as the judge and offered us his sharp knife to enjoy a few slices of the winning watermelon while we walked to the nearest barbeque shack for a couple of dozen skewers of meat.

Little things as they say.