Musings on blackberries

It's been a good year for blackberries. I think I've picked about 4kg of them in the last couple of weeks. Mostly, I admit, I've procrastinated by putting them in the freezer. But then there's nothing wrong with that. It means they're there for winter crumbles, pies, or my absolute favourite - blackberry caramel crumble tart.

In the mean time, I'm feeling lazy - so I'm eating blackberries scattered generously over home-made muesli for breakfast, or in a simple fruit salad with chunks of orange-fleshed Charentais melon.

I find blackberry-picking a curiously soothing pastime. At first, progress feels slow - simply covering the bottom of one of my plastic ice-cream boxes seems to take almost as long as filling the extra box. But before you know it you're trying to squeeze the last berries into the tub.

My blackberries have mostly come from Tooting Bec Common, an urban setting which these hardy shrubs don't mind at all. Every year I'm surprised by how few other people seem to bother picking them, the majority feeding the wasps or simply rotting. Last week the circus was in town - in fact just 100 yards away on the common as I picked. The cheers and music were a slightly incongruous background to my bucolic pastime.

On the subject of unexpected contrasts, I rarely pick blackberries without thinking of Seamus Heaney's great poem, Blackberry Picking. His recent death was sad news indeed. His description of the fruit brings together three of the five senses to convey the special quality of this humble, wild fruit as well as childhood memories. "You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet / like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it / leaving stains upon the tongue".

The contrast comes in the distress at the end as the picked fruit rots, the "rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache". The line that always rings in my ears as I pick is the final one: "Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not."

Yes, I am thankful for my freezer.