The Price of Jam.

So why do wild blackberry bushes insist on undoing your shoelaces? Is it a childish prank or exacting some retribution? I mean new age folks who ask vegetation for permission before picking fruit should reconsider and adopt a more, “You mess with my boots mate and I’ll rip your roots off” attitude. If you ask a bush it’s more likely to reply, silently, “Whatever you like mate but if I could just get my thorns on your footwear I’d be out of this fucking field before you could say soft fruit purée.” And why is it you pick one blackberry and all the others flap about in a tizzy trying to avoid capture? Is it nerves or just being perverse? Anyway I set off for home with 2lbs of blackberries and happened on a herd of Alpacas. Now alpacas are very fond of shagging. When they’re not shagging they like to play shagging. Charles comes up to Roland and says, “Fancy a shag?” Roland replies, “But you’re not gay.” “No I just fancy a game.” “Oh alright then.” Shag shag shag etc. I mean they even look Italian. So there’s this big black one standing right by the fence and I engage it in pleasant conversation. It chews, considers and then spits at me, Pthwat. You bastard! So I spit back. I’m not having some half domesticated animal from Albania or wherever they come from projectiling cud at me. So we become involved in a spitting match. I notice the small movements that precede his retaliations, the chewing and rolling it round in his mouth and decide, being the more intelligent, to present him with this winning insight and proving I had the capability to devise an extremely elegant early warning system. “You’ve given the game away mate. First you chew and then roll it….” Pthwat. “You bastard! You got me again.” I decide this game is beneath me and besides that I’m losing to a four-legged woolly Albanian. I get home and boil the fruit. I add the sugar and get out our trusty old jam thermometer. With the old cookbook and pre war thermometer I’m transported to my childhood and the pure simpler world of Mrs Beaton. I see ‘JAM’ is marked at 105*C and then notice at 155*C it says ‘CRACK’. What!? Were my bastions of respectability into cocaine production? OK I made six jars of blackberry jam but I’ve had to lie down what with bushes that steal your shoes, losing a spitting match to an Albanian and Lloyd George on amphetamines, it’s all been too much.