Blowing a Raspberry

We were out for a walk yesterday evening. When we first arrived here we went for a walk most evenings if it was fine, but it’s a habit we’ve got out of recently. In fact it’s worse than that, it’s a habit that we’ve replaced with another: the evening ritual of drinks and nibbles on the sofa before supper. Needless to say, there’s only one way that can end, and that’s with the pair of us having to be winched out of the house through the window because we can no longer be squeezed out through the door. So, at my suggestion, we dragged ourselves away from the nibbles last night and set off to check the level of the water in the ford*

We had not gone far before we spotted the first wild raspberry glowing bright red among the leaves of the hedgerow (ten days earlier, it would appear, than last year). These really are delicious, much sweeter and more fragrant than commercially grown ones with almost a vanilla flavour (that’s vanilla as in ‘tasting like vanilla’ not vanilla as in ‘not tasting like anything’ – ice cream manufacturers please take note). They don’t grow as thickly as blackberries do, and there’s no question of taking any home, or even them lasting long enough on the bush to be photographed for posterity – to see one is to eat one, and then to start hunting around for the next.

The discovery that there were snacks on this walk considerably cheered up the other half at the time. But I suspect that it may also have defeated the object of the whole exercise. I wonder just how thinly spread the raspberries would have to be for the walk to be calorifically neutral…

*Dry as a bone, since you ask.