HAS anyone else noticed how scarce mushrooms are this year? I’ve seen the odd one here and there but nothing like the usual numbers. Once it would have drawn comment but there’s not the same interest nowadays. Fifty years ago people used to turn out in droves to pick them for breakfast. Fresh field mushrooms fried with a couple of rashers of bacon, in the bacon fat – you don’t get anything nicer.

Likewise with blackberries.

You still get a few people picking them, mainly for jammaking, but once they were in big demand for puddings and pies – especially puddings. A big, fat, juicy bramble pudding, made with suet from the butcher’s, is something whose equal you won’t find in any high-class restaurant.

I always say that if I was going to be hanged tomorrow, and it was this time of year, I’d ask for a bramble pudding for my last meal.

Mind you, you are not supposed to pick them after Michaelmas (September 29), because they used to say at Michaelmas the devil wees (not the actual word used) on them.

Tony Kelly, Crook.