INCREASING numbers of people are taking up foraging.

These days, this is called ‘food for free’ but years ago, this activity could so easily cross the thin line and become ‘scrumping.’ The latter is actually theft, as the village policeman once informed me in no uncertain manner as my parents sat ashen-faced in the living room while my crimes were listed one by one.

My mind was actually on other things… not least of which was the uncanny similarity of PC Detmer’s face to an outsize, over-ripe and ready-to-pluck Cox’s Orange Pippin.

I blame my maternal grandmother for all this.

If anyone so much as looked at ‘her’ blackberry hedge, she’d see them off with a flea in their ear.

Grandmother also collected sheep’s wool that had been snagged on barbed wire or brambles and wove it into items of clothing.

But this was no middle-class eccentricity. She had been left a widow with four young children during the 1930s, a time when there was little provision for people down on their luck.

And that was real poverty… not the same condition as that which now has the convenient adjective ‘relative’ that is so often attached to it.

*A FRIEND of mine went on a press trip to a West Country cider orchard and asked me to go along for some unfathomable reason. Cider and yours truly? As if... surely some mistake.

Now, I’d always assumed that the traditional brew served up to farm labourers in years gone by must have been of low alcohol content.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

Apparently, those horny-handed sons of toil not only drank highoctane scrumpy but they could also sink more than a gallon a day as they sweated away in the harvest fields. We were told this by our guide, a buxom wench with a backside wider than the trailer on which we toured the orchards.

It was a Cider with Rosie moment that left me wondering how the late Laurie Lee managed to stay sober enough to write a single sentence, let alone such a modern classic.