On blackberries, and the changing climate

We spotted the very first ripe blackberry on the 7th July. A whole two weeks earlier than the year before, when they ripened just before school finished for the summer holidays. Yesterday, on the way home from school, we harvested our first batch. Back at home, we ate them with vegan ice cream, plus chocolate biscuits and sprinkles, at the request of my daughter.

Ripe blackberries bring so much joy - I’m excited to make crumbles, jam and maybe some muffins for the school baking competition.

Picking them is joyous too: scratched arms, stained fingers, lifting my daughter on my shoulders to reach the highest ones. Often we’ve gone with friends, an excitable berry-picking party of kids and adults, complete with a borrowed walking stick, an excellent innovation for pulling down high branches.

If we have enough, my daughter loves to squish the berries up to dye old clothes - I remember several pairs of pants and leggings drying on the washing line once, painted with purple stripes!

Alongside the joy, I’m feeling strange. They are so early this year. Weirdly early, wrongly early.

We think of them as an early Autumn fruit, part of the mists and mellow fruitfulness. If Jack Frost got them, they’d lose their taste. Instead they’re arriving closer to midsummer. Janey Thompson’s comment on a blackberry photo I posted demonstrated starkly the change in just a couple of generations - in her childhood blackberries were picked in October half-term, and with her kids, mid-August. And now, they are a whole month earlier. They should ripen with the apples: everything is out of sync.

The ripe blackberries are a very real marker of how our climate is changing - alongside the heatwaves, and the fires, and the floods, obviously. It’s not like we’re unaware - we can see the disaster unfolding in front of our eyes, seemingly in slow increments, until it doesn’t feel slow anymore.

I feel anxious, but at the same time resigned to what is going to happen. We are pretty much powerless; we can do what we can, but the damage has been done, and people are already suffering. We have known the score for decades, and only governments and big business can make any sort of change at the level needed. And they aren’t going to.

I do what I can to reduce the harm I cause on a personal level, and encourage others to do the same - focusing locally, building networks, growing food. I am angry, and refuse to hide my head in the sand and pretend it isn’t happening. And yet - we have to find a way to live through this as best we can, without being paralysed by fear.

Where I have come to, for now, is living with my eyes open - building a joyful life however I can, day by day, with the knowledge that we can never really know what’s around the corner, and that things are likely to get much, much harder.

I’ll keep on picking the blackberries.