My mother sent me blackberrying for her the other day, around the corner from her place. It's something I hadn't done in years. It took the best part of an hour of my time (until I was recalled home by text message for lunch), which I would not have spared at home in the big bad megalopolis, and I got scratched by brambles and thistles, and stung (multiple times) by nettles—and yet I loved it. It was like a window onto the rural idyllic childhood I read about in books, but which I never really had myself, growing up in the city as I did (albeit all bar next to several square miles of cow-dotted pasture land Newcastle).