@ Captain_Cretin...
"I am not sure how much they harvested this year."
Well, if you'd done the decent thing and introduced me to the lady, I would have happily inspected her trees, and the answer then would be "Nothing" because I'd have eaten them all! :laugh:
You might be a little luckier out your way, I suppose, that part of the country being one of the traditional growing areas, but I hardly ever see decent English pears in the shops these days - partly, no doubt, because Ms "Oh Dear It's Got Spots On The Skin I Don't Like The Look Of That" Hermetically Sealed Brainless Modern Mother doesn't like what she sees compared with the tasteless but visually "perfect" fruit that she sees in the the plastic packs in the supermarket, so won't buy them. Add to that the fact that pears are a bit of a minority interest (I'm sure half the younger generation think they only exist to add a bit of colour variety to tins of fruit cocktail), and the smaller shops that might otherwise have something more edible than the supermarket garbage don't find it worth their while to stock them.
@DTMark...
Yes, as you say, it was going on long before the Stepney Green outage, so that wasn't the reason, and there doesn't seem to have been an obvious logical cause.
Oh well - one of life's little mysteries, probably with as little chance of being solved as the question "Where did my name-changing twice-bankrupt 3x great-grandfather disappear to, and what name did he dream up next, after the wife decided she'd had enough, dumped him in Leicester and went home to Essex in 1854?" :laugh: