Country Life
BY IAN NIALL WHEN I was a small boy we used to have picnics towards the end of summer and our route used to lie across a moor where peat was cut by the farmers. The moor road was fringed with bilberry bushes and we stopped fre- quently to pick the berries which stained our fingers and left tell-tale stains on our mouths when we swore we had saved all we had picked for the making of bilberry tart. It is not often that one can step back into child- hood, but I was sitting by a lake up in the hills the other day when I noticed the little bilberry bushes as thick on the cliff as the fur on a bear. Why I had not spotted them there before I do not know, but soon I was picking the fruit. They seemed to be sharper-flavoured bilberries than those of long ago. Picking took me much longer than I had expected. When I got home I had to admit that I might have had more trout had I not spent so long picking berries, but next day at lunch I enjoyed a bilberry tart and no fruit bought in a shop could ever have tasted as nice. I still had faint stains on my lingers and, as so often when a child, a blue tongue. Such is nostalgia.
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