Blackberry jam

Karleen succumbed to a flu-like virus yesterday and stayed off work. As her resident physician I prescribed aspirin, white rum, limes and honey. Later, as a booster to these medications, I went to get chocolate. Walking by the scenic route to the supermarket — over the hill instead of round it — I took a path where brambles were weighed down with fruit. I’d been waiting for their ripening and here they were waiting for me! Buying chocolate was a shameful betrayal in the circumstances.

Later, I went to gather some of these humble fruit; “humble” to distinguish them from the pretentious smartphone of the same name. There were plenty of passers-by, but only one man stopped to pick, popping them straight in his mouth. I recall reading about the excited pilgrimages people made in the Twenties to pick beech-mast, a meagre nut that as a child I never managed to find before the squirrels had eaten them.

In the supermarket, there had been signs offering “blackberries” but they were blueberries, imported from elsewhere: a sad indication that people cannot recognise their own wild fruit any more.

How has this happened? The word “peasant” has become a term of abuse, but I aspire to nothing higher. Perhaps it has always been a stigma to pick wild berries, a shameful sign of poverty, though I was taught to pick them by my upper-class grandmother. For she had gone through two world wars.

Noisy polluting trucks passed nearby as I picked, perhaps bringing imported fruit to the supermarket. We’re content to let others plant and harvest our necessities, whilst we trade abstractions and suffer obesity and depression. We are pathetically enslaved to our supermarkets, which push down prices on our behalf to enslave those we have never seen. Then our charitable organisations send aid to the countries we have robbed.

In my adopted land, England, there was much poverty in the later eighteenth century. Those who stole to eat were transported to my birthplace, Australia. The rest flocked to dark Satanic mills to staff the Industrial Revolution. At the start of the twentieth century, Taylorism completed the project of depriving the working man of pride in his skills and handiwork.

If you organised them into gangs and paid them, people would certainly pick blackberries. If you produced television documentaries to tell them what’s in front of their own eyes, they might open them and see. But I’m in danger of distinguishing myself from “people”, and getting sad about humanity. I’ll go and make some blackberry jam.

Later:
My jam-making has been indirectly sabotaged by international terrorism.

News broke of the attempt to blow up planes flying from London to America, and my town was mentioned as one of three places where the suspects have been arrested. They’ve closed off part of a road near my son’s former school. Who knows, I may have exchanged looks with a perpetrator in the street, without knowing it. The TV news was absorbing for once. Since this is not Lebanon, I don’t suppose the town will be bombed for giving succour to terrorists.

From the Guardian: According to the BBC, the find was made by officers searching King’s Wood in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. A police source told the BBC that the suitcase contained “everything you would need to make an improvised device

Till now, the news has had little impact on my life. Except that in watching it on TV, I forgot the blackberries boiling on the stove. They’ve turned into toffee and stuck to the pan.

18th August:
The trouble caused by these terrorist plots goes on and on. While hand-cream is still used in this household without triggering major incident*, something nasty nearly happened to me this morning.

I was returning from the petrol station with a copy of the local paper. I learned that suspects have been arrested in every street where I once considered renting a flat, but not the street where I live now.

Without waiting to get home, I opened the paper and read as I walked. Fascinating! Mounted police (on horseback!) were patrolling King’s Wood, where parts had been cordoned off to dig for explosives. I remembered the suspicions I’d had once, recounted in “A grave mystery unearthed”.

All of a sudden, a hand grabbed my sleeve, accompanied by a loud cry. An earnest grey-haired lady was at my side. She’d been walking behind me, but speeded up when she saw that I was about to step in a pool of vomit.

I thanked her for this prompt rescue. It was nearly the second time I’d been hit: first the ruined jam, now this. I cannot say this was a win for the terrorist strategy: they’d intended to sow fear in our hearts, but for me it was curiosity. “Curiosity killed the cat”, as my Granny used to day. With this in mind, I thanked the lady and quipped “It’s all because of the terrorists, they put such chaos in our lives.”

This went over her head, perhaps because she was Polish with poor command of English. “Terrorists? Terrorists!” She rolled her eyes and pointed a finger to her temple, international sign for “bees in their bonnet”: “It’s money! All money!” Neither of us knew what the other meant.

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*The discovered bomb plot, linked to our town, involved smuggling explosive liquids on to airlines. As a precaution, international passengers were no longer allowed to take on board bottles and jars of cosmetics.