“See,” she said, and she took a piece of paper out from her jeans pocket. She unfolded it to show two perpendicular lines for roads, and two Xs – one for the Cockfosters Tube stop, one for Parkside Farm. “We just walk straight along Cockfosters Road, then we turn right on Ferny Hill, and it’ll be right there.”

“Okay!” I said. “This is gonna be great.”

I remember now, back in April, when my family was in town, Papa and Mowmy and CC and the kid, and we drove down south to the coast to get the ferry to the Isle of Wight. I’d sat in the front to navigate, the road atlas on my lap. “You’ll want to turn right in, um, a finger-width,” I’d say, and my father was happy to oblige. Perspective, it’s funny thing. Because two perpendicular lines for roads, go straight on one and turn right on the other, they sure don’t tell you anything about how long those perpendicular lines go for.



Past the Five Oaks Residential Care for Elderly Gentlefolk, past the Amazing Maize Maze, we went down the winding country road with blind curves and no sidewalk, past the wheat fields wide and brown – wheat fields! Not a half-hour Tube ride out of central London! – past the cows sitting in the shade, past that bit where I walked in the grass and Nora had to yell, “Watch out – they’re nettles!”, past the tiger butterfly, we’d lost track of time by then, it was hot and there were no other pedestrians for miles, we turned left at the PYO sign in the shape of a strawberry.

“This is gonna be great,” I said.

We had green baskets, and we were deep in the rows of blackberry plants, and Nora said, “And the thing is, you don’t know they are full of worms!”

“Um?” I said, and I paused in the blackberry picking.

“Yes!” she said. “Lots of tiny worms! I was making blackberry jam with my aunt, and you put the sugar in and you boil, and all the worms rise to the top. You can’t see them otherwise, but they’re there.”

I had a blackberry in my hand and I was looking very closely at it. “Um,” I said. “Wum.” I was looking very hard, and the blackberry was still.

“I see no worms,” I said.

“Because they’re tiny!” she said, and she popped a blackberry in her mouth. “Mmm,” she said, and then held another out to me. “Try this,” she said, as if I was wearing a T-shirt that said “I am mad for wormberries”.

“Get away from me!” I said, but after, quietly, I picked a fat, ripe one, checked it for signs of wormy life, then, satisfied, ate it: sweet berry goodness.



We went up the fields and down the fields, blackberries first, then raspberries – the strawberries were on their way out. We pulled onions out of onion-scented ground and rifled about for tomatoes, orange turning red.

The wind carried on it a familiar lilt, and I turned to look. “Those people are Singaporean,” I said, and, as if to oblige, the man in shorts and sandals said to his wife: “Eh this raspberry inside got hole.” “Yah what, raspberry,” the woman said. “Inside the hole got ants,” the man said.



We poked around in the zucchini plants – have you ever seen a zucchini plant? It is amazing, like life is amazing. You know sometimes you go to a restaurant and they have zucchini flowers? They are from the zucchini plant! Yes, smug ones, now it seems so obvious. But you cannot say it is clear when you see it, black ink on a thick off-white menu. Me, I’d never seen zucchini flowers except on a dinner plate. Saturday, the zucchini flowers were on the zucchini plants, yellow and floaty like a dress for the big day at the horse races, and – wait for it – you think you know but you have no idea – zucchini flowers grow out of zucchini ass. This is a true story, and, now you know, life is amazing.

“This is amazing,” I said, because it was.

We picked till we were all picked out, then Nora washed her feet at the steel pipe. Then we went past the tiger butterfly, past the nettles, past the cows, past the combine harvester in the wheat fields, down the shady country road to the Ferny Hill Tea Rooms, where the waitress brought us milkshakes.

There’d been the grassy walks and there’d been sun all day, and we were very quiet on the train home. There was energy enough to wash the stickiness off me before I fell, heavily, into bed.

I tell you what, though: today is tomorrow, I have slept, and now there will be jam for days.