I used to live across the road from a park overrun with brambles. They weren’t wild blackberries, but some kind of cultivar that had broken free, people said, from allotments during the second world war. That meant the berries were bigger and ripened considerably earlier than the wild ones. People started picking them in late July, and after a couple of years I started to blindly follow their example.
Collecting them was easy; the difficulty lay in figuring out what to do with them. Generally, after suffering an acute failure of imagination, I would produce eight to 10 jars of blackberry jam, most of them given away at Christmas to people who must have suspected I held some kind of grudge against them. No matter: as long as you get little kids to make your labels for you, people feel uncomfortable complaining.
