I HAVE been trying in recent weeks to stop myself saying: "Ah, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" as if I, or most others, know what the next line of the poem is. It has also been difficult to avoid starting to sound like the author of a newspaper's countryside notes column.
But it has been that sort of season - fields turning from golden to brown to green in quick succession as this year's crops were harvested and next year's sown, a wonderful range of leaf colours as autumn bites, loaded apple and crabapple trees, hawt
horn and rosehip bushes thick with haws and hips, elderberries for the taking and the conker tree of my dreams.
A pity that dreams of having a 101-er were long ago and the chestnut tree is in France. Where was it when I needed it trying to sneak unseen into and out of the vicar's garden, home of the best conker tree in our district?
Where it is now, I guess, producing hundreds of large, shiny, conkers that French schoolboys ignore. No question of them trying to climb the tree or beat conkers down with sticks while fighting off the opposition. Small wonder they lost the world cup rugby semi-final. Instead giant conkers fall neglected in dozens daily to be mashed on the narrow country road by broad-wheeled tractors, the baker's van, the post van, the district nurse and occasional motorbike.
For old times' sake I was tempted to bore holes in a handful and string them up, recalling how that was once such an important autumn ritual with the best tools of the trade believed to be a horseshoe nail and leather lace, while the wise guys claimed that baking in the oven or over-winter pickling produced best results.
Possibly. What I do remember, a valuable lesson for life, was that the biggest and shiniest were not necessarily best. In contact with some gnarled veteran - pickled or baked as it might have been - the big and shiny often split easily and fell apart.
Given that view of what big and shiny might do, and foreign at that, by gad, I gave up the idea of bringing a bag of French conkers home, contenting myself with carrying a pocketful on walks there and throwing them into hedgerows.
At home the same wistfulness for chances lost has applied to the rosehip bushes passed on walks. Where were they when I spent hours trying to get my 10lb badge when rosehip syrup on school-dinner semolina was supposed to be good for us and a grateful Government paid gullible children three old pence for every pound of hips collected?
Or, another way of looking at it, we were paid to get useful exercise by walking miles, having to extricate ourselves from thickets that would tax the SAS and getting scratched silly. Man, those good old days.
Brambles, to the uninitiated, come into the same category as rosehips of little reward for much pain and effort. Not so. This year we accumulated brambles on the little and often principle, freezing whatever we found, then on the great day - we live quiet lives - boiled the lot, strained the juice, boiled again and filled half a dozen jars with the best jelly you can get. Man the hunter-gatherer had done it again.
The full article contains 569 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
