This surely is the king of pears. The Comice.

When this beauty is ripe, its flesh will be as soft as can be but with granularity that delivers perfect texture. It’s like eating a little piece of heaven. If you add to this experience, wonderful in its own right, the fountain of juice that erupts from its wound when you take a bite through the skin. A bite that delivers sweetness almost beyond pleasure itself. The juice trickles down through your fingers and along the underside of your forearm, only finding its way to the ground when it reaches as far as your elbow.

Do I sound like I love these beautiful fruits? If I don’t then there is something very, very wrong. Do I sound like I have eaten many of these before? If not, then I’ve lost my ability to write what I think.

Comice pears are the great Christmas treat of my childhood, brought to my by my Auntie Dot, who is, in fact, my great-aunt, my Nan’s only remaining sibling from their family of eight. Auntie Dot has had a hard life, like all of the women from my Mum’s family. She lost her husband too long ago, has a downs syndrome grand-daughter and only this year lost one of her children to cancer. She has lived and worked for many, many years on one of Kent’s fruit farms. Working on a farm is, without question, hard work and Auntie Dot spent year after year tending fruit trees and picking the fruit in autumn.

We used to go and help to pick summer soft fruits like blackcurrants and redcurrants, while on holiday from school. I can remember as clearly as if it was yesterday, sitting in brick huts, lined with wooden benches eating corned beef sandwiches and drinking milky, sweet coffee out of thermos flasks. I can’t smell a blackcurrant bush now without the weight of those memories flooding back.

Each year, just before Christmas, as long as we were in the UK, we would take a trip to see all of our relatives in Kent and this would always include a stop at Auntie Dot’s house where we would stock up with fruit for the Christmas season. There would be Cox’s and Bramleys from the apple orchards and Comice pears if we were lucky.

They’d all be wrapped in paper to protect them from bruising and when we got home they’d be brought out of their wrappings so they would have time to ripen for Christmas.

Many of the Kentish fruit farms are now grubbed up, since the march of the supermarket and the march of French apples and those from even further afield. I have no real idea whether my Auntie Dot’s farm is still a working fruit farm these days.

I can’t remember the last time I had one of Auntie Dot’s wonderful Comice pears. So, when I saw these pears in the farm shop today, a couple of them found their way into my basket to see if they live up to the ones of my childhood. I am going to be either thrilled or devastated when I bite into one! Let’s hope it’s the former.

Last year, little Greg, who was yesterday's star, made his first appearance here.