For as long as I’ve been writing things on the internet, I’ve been getting correspondence. I like to refer to this correspondence as ‘letters’ - even though that isn’t - usually - true. Usually. Sometimes it actually is. But that’s another story.
Sometimes I can predict that something will provoke ‘letters’ - but often I can’t. Just as I can’t tell what things will catch people’s attention and which won’t. I just keep on writing anyway.
Last week’s Saturday column made a brief mention of the raspberries that I have growing in my garden. It’s fair to say that I didn’t expect to get letters about them. But I did. The award for the first person to write in went to my friend (irl) R, who pointed out an important issue with my writing.
“Just a fact check,” she wrote: “You mention raspberry bushes but raspberries aren't a bush - they are canes.”
“This,” I thought, “is marvellous.”
I love the fact that somebody, in this instance, the brilliant R, cares enough about raspberries to ensure that they are referred to in the correct terms.
“This is how it should be,” I thought, and I wrote and told R how excellent I thought her email was.
“I thought I sounded a bit pedantic,” she confessed.
I don’t mind a bit of pedantry, myself, in fact I rather like it. Sometimes too much. My kids have told me that I have to stop complaining when people use the plural ‘panini’ to refer to a single bread roll. “It should be panino,” I am now forced to mutter, with stifled passive aggression, under my breath.
R is not the first person to write to me to offer a critique or point out an error. The names of those who have done so over the years are legion, for they are many. Mainly my errors are grammatical.
“Commas are for clauses, not pauses,” advised my (English teacher) friend (irl) J, after yet another egregious blunder. “Every day is a learning day!” I tell myself. This leads me to wonder if the whole point of writing things for other people to read is really just a complex way for me to learn about the world and the mysteries of the English language.
R was not just writing to tell me off for saying ‘bushes’ instead of ‘canes’ though, she had an observation to make after I said that, due to some mystery, I get fruit both in summer (less), and then again autumn (more!)
“I think you may have different varieties in your garden - the summer fruiting type, and the autumn fruiting type,” she ventured. I pondered this idea before deciding that on this point she is wrong.
The trouble is that the fruit I get, both in summer and autumn, appears on the same canes. I don’t have some canes that fruit in the summer (now) and others that fruit in the autumn (then), they all do both. I’m not making this up. I have observed it carefully, and it is a mystery of the very best sort.
What I like best about raspberry canes is that they are very low maintenance beasts, I cut them back, savagely, at the end of the autumn fruiting period (sometimes this is December) and they roar back the next year with yet more fruit. I don’t weed or water them, I just let them do their thing. And their thing is what they do. with delicious results.
So perhaps there is a gardening expert reading this who can explain the mystery of the double fruiting raspberry canes, in some ways I’d be happy to understand what’s going on with them, but in others I don’t much care. I just go ahead and pick them.
This week’s column was going to be about jackdaws, I suppose that will now have to wait for another time.
‘Saturday columns’ are short, sometimes (relatively) funny, basically true* stories of mundanity and mishaps from my life.
*Some names, locations and other details may have been changed to protect the guilty.