The first Kent cherries are here. You will not see good ones again until next summer.

The first English cherries are in. Dark, glossy, splitting-sweet, sold by the punnet at the market and the better greengrocers, and guaranteed to stain your fingers on the walk home. After a long winter and spring of imported fruit flown in from somewhere warmer, the Kent and Herefordshire crop has come good in the past week or two, and it is the proper stuff: cherries that taste of a specific place and a specific fortnight.

Here is the thing about them. The British cherry season is brutally short — roughly late June to August, with the peak in July, and then gone for another year. You cannot get a good English cherry in February. Not really. Not one worth the bother. In an economy built to make everything available all the time — same-day, year-round, optimised down to the minute — the cherry simply refuses. It ripens when it ripens, and then it stops, and no amount of wanting changes that.

Which is, if you let it be, a small gift rather than an inconvenience. This publication keeps asking what people might do with time that is not owed to work. One modest answer the cherry offers: we might learn to tell the time by the season again. A life arranged around a job runs on the clock — the deadline, the quarter, the always-on inbox. A life with a little more time off the clock could run on something older and slower: the few weeks the cherries are good, the fortnight the strawberries peak, the evening the elderflower is out and then is not. Not productivity. Ripeness. There are worse ways to mark a year.

So buy more than you mean to while they are here. Eat most of them straight from the bag. And do something easy with the rest.

**At your table — Roasted cherries, for spooning over almost anything**

You need: 400g cherries, stalks off, halved and stoned; 2 tbsp caster sugar (or a good squeeze of honey); 1 tbsp red wine vinegar or balsamic, if you have it — optional, but it sharpens them; a strip of orange peel or a split vanilla pod if you are feeling it.

Method: Heat the oven to 200C / 180C fan. Tip everything into a small roasting tin and toss. Roast for 12 to 15 minutes, until the cherries have slumped and are sitting in their own syrupy juices. Let them cool a little. Spoon them, juice and all, over thick yoghurt, vanilla ice cream or morning porridge; or fold them through softly whipped cream for a near-instant fool. They keep three days in the fridge. No cherry stoner? Press each one against the side of the tin with your thumb and fish the stone out — messy, slightly absurd, completely fine.

**Why it matters here**

This is a British season, a British fruit, and a genuinely cheap pleasure for a couple of months only — Kent and Herefordshire orchards, your local market, or a pick-your-own farm if you fancy the afternoon out. The point is not the recipe, lovely as it is. It is that the good things have a time, and the time is now.