Now That’s What I Call a Breakdown

 Summer tastes like sticky fingers and stolen sips. It tastes like joy that melts if you don’t grab it fast enough. It tastes like things that stain—lips, tongues, clothes, memories.

Some favourites:

🍓 Strawberries — always slightly too soft and slightly too sweet, like they know they’re on borrowed time. Eaten straight from the punnet in a park. Bonus points if there’s cream involved and you’re pretending to be at Wimbledon even though you’ve never watched a full match in your life.

🍦 Ice cream vans — specifically the Mr. Whippy kind with the flake jammed in like an afterthought. Bonus if it’s drizzled with that radioactive blue syrup that definitely isn’t fruit. I want it melting down my hand before I even pay.

🍉 Watermelon — not elegant, just necessary. I want it fridge-cold, juicy to the point of danger, consumed with my head tilted sideways over a sink like I’m in a teen movie montage. Spitting seeds optional but encouraged.

🧃 Carton drinks — Capri-Sun, Um Bongo, anything that involves stabbing a foil circle with a bendy straw. If I’m not dangerously close to squirting it up my nose mid-laugh, I don’t want it.

🍔 Barbecue food — burgers that are slightly burnt, crisps that taste like smoke from being near the grill, limp salad from a corner shop. Eaten off paper plates with weird little forks. Perfection.

🥤 Frozen slush — teeth-achingly cold and the colour of mood swings. Not real flavours, just vibes: electric blue, sour pink, maybe “green.” Bonus if it gives me a brain freeze that feels like cosmic punishment.

Summer food isn’t about refinement. It’s about mess and memory and your tongue turning colours and eating things just because they feel like the thing you’re supposed to eat right now. I’m not after gourmet—I’m after the edible version of a pop hook that lives in your brain for weeks. Loud, over-sweet, and just the right kind of wrong.