(Not a poem ode. It’s been a long day. I can’t be doing with poetry faff. But a piece of prose in the spirit of an ode. A sort of ‘prode’, if you will.
Oh yes, it’s all very well keeping your raspberry canes orderly and tied up, both for neatness and convenience. Once those sweet little cushions of sunshine, all velvet and warm, are away and galloping at this time of year, it’s all very convenient to be able to take your bowl and walk up and down the regimented lines, selecting the fruit at their peak of ripeness, and taking them inside for tea, five minutes tops, job done.
‘Some delicious British fresh single cream with your raspberries, Madam?’
‘Don’t mind if I do, Jeeves.’
But where is the fun in that, eh? Where is the fun in a life of ease and convenience? A sailor doesn’t learn to sail if there are no storms. (This has nothing to do with raspberries. But, like I say, it’s been a long day.) No, what you really need is the joy, nay fun, of raspberries growing in a thicket of their own, wild making.
So you take your bowl, and stand for a moment, perusing the thicket before you (ten feet square and six feet high), contemplating the best way to enter. For you know that many raspberries are waiting therein, but that their honour be guarded with hidden dangers - nettles, thistles, little bastard insect creatures waiting to stab at your bare arms. But you’ve taken the precaution of donning a cardie beforehand, right? You’re not going in bare skinned and vulnerable, are you? Of course not...
So you lift the first cane, seemingly bare of ripe fruit, and what is that? Dangling beneath its canopy of leaves is a branch strung like a necklace of rubies - raspberries dangling, precious jewels all, once hidden but now revealed. You duck into the thicket - you have found your starting point.
Go slowly, my little thicket adventurer - for each cane will require lifting and turning thus, to reveal its treasures. Oh yes, some might be obvious - these are the braver raspberries, the ones that relish a face to the sun and have no need of leaf cover to protect them. They tease you. ‘Here we are!’ they say. ‘Up here, at the top of this cane you neglected to prune and which has now grown eight feet tall! Catch us, if you dare!’
And you reach up, eyes blinded by the sun, dipping slowly westwards now, and you catch that little tease of a raspberry and because it is so warm, it never makes it to the bowl you are carrying. It is a magic ‘straight-into-the-mouth-melt-on-the-tongue’ moment. ‘That’ll teach you,’ you say, stepping further into the thicket and straight into a patch of tiny nettles, the kind that manage always to find the sliver of bare skin between your trouser cuffs and your snazzy gardening clogs.
You make your way slowly through the thicket, never knowing quite which way to turn because there is no set path to lead you. You become the Thicket Nomad. You think, a machete would be useful, but also counterproductive. This raspberry season will go on for weeks yet - it would be berritable madness (!) to go crazy with a blade in here for the hell of convenience. At some point, something will brush across the top of your feet which you cannot see, hidden as they are by rampant foliage. What is it? Leaves, maybe? Another nettle? That huge toad who still lives in the woodshed but has decided, because it is a lovely day, to take a perambulation eastwards to see what lies thereabouts?
So you duck down to investigate, into the cool depths of the shady undergrowth, just in case it is a snake, or something. And look! What do you see? Heavy clusters of raspberry upon raspberry, thinking that if they kept very still and didn’t make a sound, they would be safe, hidden here, in the shadowy realm near the earth, protected by the sheer lushness of their parent plant. Ha, fools!
And as you rise, your bowl filling nicely, thank you very much, you glance back ‘pon where you’ve traversed and see MORE raspberries, themselves revealed because you are looking at the thicket now from a different angle! Perhaps, you think, I should see this raspberry thicket as a metaphor for life, to always try and see things from different angles. But then you think, ‘Bugger. I’ve got to get another bowl. This one is full already.’
And so you exit the thicket and return with a second bowl, for you are now an Intrepid Thicket Warrior, and you will not be beaten. This time you turn right, to make a rear guard attack around the back of the Giant Gooseberry Bush, a thicket in its own right (gooseberries still rock hard but they won’t be long before they, too, are ready for plucking). You stretch and bend, duck and dive, plunge forth as though traversing a wild raspberry ocean with your frantic freestyle swimming. Up and down you go, back and forth. One here, three there, a proud lone raspberry, a cluster of six, seven - no, a dozen!
And after half an hour, you emerge from that thicket triumphant! It has surrendered its treasures for another day for payment of a bare few scratches. And a couple of stings. The pain of your forage will soon be forgot, once you savour those raspberries for your pudding. And you’ve dosed yourself up with antihistamine and half a bottle of TCP.
Why would you truss your raspberry canes into neat lines, then? Think of all the fun and joy you would miss? No, tidy rows and goods on obvious display are the supermarket of raspberry picking. For real adventure, let them run rampant in a thicket.
This post was brought to you by ‘Picking Raspberries in the Sun is Fun in a Thicket. It’s a Different Kettle of Soft Fruit When It’s Sodden With Rain Though’ for all your harvest excitement needs.
Here are the raspberries - all 1lb 3oz of them...
Comments