Watermelon woes

On the whole, we love watermelon. They're huge at this time of year in Cyprus, and very inexpensive. A couple of weeks ago we had a beautifully sweet and juicy one, so we decided to buy another yesterday morning, when doing our weekly supermarket visit. Richard's been shown by the locals how and where to tap a watermelon to tell when it's ripe, so he tapped several, and managed to find a smallish one that sounded exactly right. With Dan in Africa, and Tim camping in the mountains with the youth group this weekend, there are only two of us in the house for a few days.

I put the watermelon straight in the fridge when we got home. In the evening, after supper, Richard cut it up - or half of it. He cut off the peel and chopped it into chunks. The colour was gorgeous, a deep pinkish-red, and there weren't even very many pips (seedless watermelons are unknown here).

I took my first piece. Cool and crunchy, yes. Juicy, yes. Sweet - no, not really. Rather bland, in fact. Ah well, it happens. Even tasteless watermelons are refreshing.

I took another piece. It gave me a faint fizzing sensation on my tongue, rather unexpectedly. I frowned. I commented that perhaps we should eat it fairly quickly as I didn't think it was going to keep long, since it tasted as if it was about to ferment.

Richard took a piece. He was less fortunate than me... he took one bite, and couldn't eat the rest. He said he thought it had already gone bad. I tried one more piece, and agreed with him. When we smelled it closely, there was a definite (albeit faint) sour aroma.

We've never had this happen before; usually watermelons start to go soft before they go bad. But... this is Cyprus. Life is rarely predictable. So we shrugged and then threw the entire thing on the compost heap.