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If you've seen or read
Can I Have My Ball Back? you'll know that as I waited for my operation I had reasonable fears that I might be about to cark it and my main concern was creating memories for my young kids so they wouldn't forget me. This was for me, not them of course. I didn't want to put in all that early years work just to be wiped from history and be replaced by some moustachioed chancer in cowboy boots who'd bedazzle my grieving wife, drink my whisky and get called dad by kids.
My attempts to create memories at that time usually went wrong, though the day after I was told I was going to lose a ball, I went kite flying with Phoebe and it was just one of those perfect father daughter moments that I knew she'd remember. I just asked her if she remembered it. She does. So if I had gone she would have had that and the interloping whisky-breathed idiot who took my place could not take that away from me. Just everything else.
The kids are now 9 and nearly 7 and so the memory of me is secured, even if it would become shaky and unreliable if I went now. And in the three and a half years since my operation I have really appreciated those special moments we've had all the more, whether it's coming down the Rapid River at Center Parcs together or doing a ten mile bike ride with Phoebe or tobogganing down a hill on holiday and Ernie crashing through some netting or Ernie pooping on my parents' patio or finding Anglo Saxon torcs whilst digging up the garden. I think you appreciate all this shit as a parent, but it has an extra resonance when there was a chance that you might not have got to experience it. Had I just ignored my gigantic bollock for a year or so more, who knows?
Anyway, Phoebe went off for a bicycle lesson today and so I took Ernie up the hill to pick blackberries. I am really going to miss having the countryside right on my doorstep (though it will be easy enough to come back here any time) and I felt a little sad that we'll be leaving soon. I've walked up this hill a good number of times with this boy, carrying him a sling to begin with, waiting for him to toddle up there when he could walk and giving up and carrying him anyway. But now, he was running up the hill, seemingly unimpeded by the gradient that was making me catch my breath even at walking pace. You don't often get one on one time with your kids when you have two or more and just walking and chatting together and seeing him distracted by floating thistle seeds and making ridiculous observations was one of those moments. When you suddenly get to step back and realise what you have and how much the little idiot with you has changed and grown. We picked loads of blackberries and took turns carrying them home. Magic.
Later I'd make a blackberry and apple crumble out of our booty. Partially free food. How amazing. I'd say we had 300+ blackberries (they didn't all go in the pie) which would have cost us maybe £50 if we'd bought them at Marks and Spencers. What a win. I did have to go out and buy some ice cream and custard and none of the other ingredients were free. But still.
It's weird to think that once upon a time, all food was free. In the ancient of days humans could just pick or kill anything they came across and then eat it at no cost to themselves (maybe cooked on a fire made of free wood, created by free flint) and yet we've got to the point where now basically the only free food remaining is blackberries. Sure if you know what you're doing and don't mind eating grass and weeds then you can still forage other stuff. If you're confident you know what you're doing you can eat fungi til the cows come home (though don't try and milk the cows as their milk is no longer free). But basically the only food left in the UK that a normal person who knows nothing about what's edible and not can eat legally for nothing is blackberries.
How have blackberries held out against the commercialisation of every possible easily recognisable food? Why has no one fenced off all the bushes and shot anyone who touches them? Why is the bramble alone the gratis food stuff of the uninformed forager?
Some of the bushes were on private land it has to be said, but if they're overhanging the fence you can take them, right? I suppose you might have the same thing with an apple tree that drops its fruit on to the pavement. But whoever owned the bushes wasn't in any hurry to harvest and frustratingly there were huge bundles of ripe fruit in the middle of the bushes that we couldn't get to without trespassing (and bringing a ladder).
A determined picker could get enough fruit to live off. Admittedly it would only keep them going for the month of August (but you could freeze them too). And return to the world where humans could eat for nothing, though now with just one choice of provision.
How have brambles done this? I am loathe to publish this because it might make the man realise he's missing a trick and will take our free blackberries away.
Or is there something in the blackberries that they want us to have? Is there a drug in them that keeps us being compliant sheeple who will never rise up or just the feeling that we're getting one thing for nothing is enough to make us hang back from revolution. The blackberry conspiracy theory starts here.
