Looking for fruit among coronavirus thorns

Foraging is fashionable now, where once it was a way of life. But for most people, it remains – as perhaps it has always been – at the fringes, something done properly only by a minority, whether for fun or from necessity.

The exception is blackberry-picking, which is – while by no means a universal experience – something that appears to rise above the broader foraging landscape. Not only are blackberries abundant (even in towns), but they are easily recognised, usually quite accessible and can be scoffed on the hoof.

When I was little, we always referred to the process as “blackberrying”. I think I have a vague memory of my grandmother using the crook of her walking stick to pull down hard-to-reach briars, but I can barely have been two and a half at the time, so perhaps it’s a vision that stems from tales told by my mother. Later in my childhood we would visit particular spots on the outer edges of our village: a track leading to the water tower was especially productive. We would pick boxes and boxes of fruit.

Yet there was never the kind of reckoning described by Seamus Heaney in his poem “Blackberry-Picking”, when collected berries are left too long and begin to grow mould. Innocence retained, perhaps.

Like Heaney, I couldn’t completely avoid the scratches though. In recent years I have, in turn, had to untangle my children from the dastardly prickles – usually those which hold the juiciest berries, tantalisingly close, if only one could lean in another inch…

In one of my favourite childhood novels, Arthur Ransome’s Secret Water, that fruit versus thorn risk-reward conundrum plays out in dramatic fashion, when Bridget, the youngest of the Swallows, pricks her thumb on a bramble. Her pain is turned to triumph, because it enables the whole Swallows and Amazons tribe to become blood brothers with a group of local children, the Eels – all the others jabbing their fingers with needles and smearing each other’s blood into the resulting wounds, in a ceremony that wouldn’t be encouraged in children’s books now.

At the back of my garden, we have left wild brambles to their own devices, and are rewarded each year with a fine, early crop – not especially big, but sweet enough; ideal with plain yogurt and a dab of maple syrup.

By the middle of September, we’re left only with the dregs – and most that look appetising from a distance are either squishy or gnarled. We have to forage elsewhere.

Last Monday, on one of the last days of summer, I climbed the modest hill behind the Essex village in which my office is based. I sat for a while in a field of tufted grass and thistles, eating a sandwich and watching planes circle over nearby Stansted airport. When my sandwich bag was empty, I took the footpath through a hedge to a strip of brambles I remembered from last year. Sure enough, the blackberries were plentiful and ripe. I came away with a large haul, and not even a scratch to show for it.

When I got home that evening, my son’s eyes lit up and he gorged himself, announcing that all the blackberries were his. The next day he was duly outraged when I ate some for breakfast, but I assured him there were plenty more where these came from and I would make a point of picking a punnet’s worth when I returned to the office on Friday.

But of course, plans are easily disturbed these days, and Boris Johnson’s announcement that working from home should recommence where possible, meant I did not go back to the office as intended, and will not do so for some time.

Instead, I will have to continue the blackberrying elsewhere. I’m sure there is still fruit to be found, among the inevitable thorns.