Simple Things

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Today it definitely feels as if autumn is in the air here in Norfolk. It's damp and misty and it's all a bit dull and depressing. Even Ollie, my big floppy black and white fluff ball of a cat, who loves spending his days outside hunting rats and mice has decided to stay indoors. I can remember when I was a child it was on days like this that Dad would take us out into the countryside to pick blackberries from various heaths throughout Norfolk. We grabbed our Tupperware boxes and spent hours getting caught up on the brambles and inevitably plucking our jumpers and got home covered in scratches but it was just a lovely family time. Once we'd got the blackberries home Mum would set to with the preserving pan and make the most delicious blackberry and apple jam. I can still remember the smell as it bubbled away on the stove. Unfortunately many of the heaths we visited have now been cordoned off as people were misusing the area - cars, not content with parking on the car park areas, started parking in amongst the bracken or driving over the top of the heather. And then the dreaded BBQ's came into being and careless cooks allowed sparks to fly setting light to the heather and doing massive damage to the wonderfully wild and beautiful area and so the areas were fenced off. Likewise, we used to go 'primrosing' and 'violet picking' as children but penny pinching gardeners decided they didn't want to travel out into the Norfolk countryside to see them but would rather dig them up and plant them in their gardens. Also, the ever evolving weed killers used on the farmland got onto these gorgeous little flowers and killed them so, the kids of today will never experience that simple pleasure. We were always told that we should pick a few flowers but make sure that we left some as they looked pretty for other passers by. And thinking about violets, around 15-20 years ago I used to walk from my house into the local village and there was a rather dilapidated house on the corner of the road. Every spring a beautiful little patch of violets grew on a bank surrounding the house but you had to be looking quite hard to see it as the bank was mainly nettles and other weeds. But I used to love seeing it flowering every spring. A few years back the house was sold, demolished and a new house was built. One Saturday morning when I was walking into the village I saw two men talking close to the bank where the violets grew and I heard them say that they were going to dig up the bank and put down concrete posts and then put in wooden panels. I was horrified to think that I wouldn't see my little bunch of violets so, on the way back from the shop, having noticed that the two men were nowhere to be seen, I bent down and pretended that I was re-arranging my bunch of bananas in my shopping bag and swiftly pulled up a root of the violets, tucked it in amongst the bananas and carried on my walk home. The violets on the bank have long since disappeared but I now have a beautiful little patch just outside my kitchen door but it's so sad that people don't look at what's growing around them before they start digging.