Personal Blogs

Dear fly,

To leave me alone

Would be a good deed.

Mother and father,

Your voices are faint

I think I am lost to you.

It's tough being a stand up comedian. You can't afford to fall down on the job.

Damned fly.

You stopped me.

"I also live".

That's what you said.

Or not exactly that. But thinking about wild blackberries reminded me of other wild fruits.

Round here we really have only the blackberries, and sloes. Sloes are delicious as the fruit that goes into the gin-based liqueur named for them, but if you eat one plucked from the hedgerow your mouth and eyes screw up instantly. All the same I believe the sloe is part-ancestor of some cultivated plums.

Further afield, or perhaps a-wood is more accurate, I have eaten wild strawberries and raspberries in many places. I've also consumed many crab apples; usually jellified, but also crisp, sharp and raw, fresh from the tree.

Crab apples vary a lot, and may often I think have some cultivated genes in them, either crossed from regular apples, or perhaps from crab apple cultivars grown for jelly making.

All these fruits are probably members of the rose family, and rose bushes produce their own fruit - rosehips. These are supposed to be a good source of Vitamin C. If you are about the same age as me you may remember Delrosa Syrup.

First there was a proposal to remove the "Disagree" button.

"Agree" won the vote, so "Disagree" was removed.

Then there was a proposal to reinstate the "Disagree" button.

No-one disagreed, so it was reinstated.

Q. How do you get a baby leaf salad off to sleep?

A. Rocket.

Geese Iheardyoutell

Each other where you're going tonight.

Please take me too.

I love eating wild blackberries during my walks at this time of year. Sampling one or two tart berries from every bush along the way, it always seems to me that each produces fruit unlike any other, any place else: as (they say) small vineyards produce distinctively different wines because of their soil and situation.

But professional tasters (if any exist) of local blackberries have to work on a much more delicate scale than wine tasters. One meter is a long way in blackberry space.

A poem Blackberry Picking by Seamus Heaney starts

And why not

               \

                  \

                     !

                        Sack me

                                      Then

                                                    I'll

                                                    Havemore

Time to figure out

Poetry

Yours not