Cream of the crop

I HAVE just eaten a wonderful bowl of lightly mashed new season strawberries sprinkled liberally with castor sugar and anointed with cream.

So what’s remarkable about that? Well, for a start I ‘don’t do strawberries’! I’m thoroughly bored of huge tasteless berries from January to December, so I manage to avoid them virtually the whole year, apart from a few weeks in summer. Even then they are rarely worth getting excited about, unless one can find some of the older varieties that haven’t been irrigated on a daily basis, they are scarcely worth bothering about. Problem is, I can vividly remember what strawberries used to taste like.

I remember the agonising wait for them to ripen in the little strawberry patch in our garden. There were never enough to have even a little feast. I remember my friend Bernie and I desperately trying to work out some diversionary tactics to distract Mrs Cody in Tubberloe so she wouldn’t spot us sneaking into her vegetable garden. Of course she caught us and put the run on us.