We've joined the blogosphere to give a day-to-day account of our foraging adventures. Actually it'll probably be more of a month-by-month account but the point is that we'll be charting our foraging year on here and putting the highlights up on the website.
Lots of foragey things popping up in the press at the moment, precipitated it seems by all the doom-mongering surrounding the credit crunch. I'd suggest that anyone trying to save money by foraging is on a hiding to nothing. The economics are not in the forager's favour, certainly not with the light harvests available in London. Unless of course you treat it as a hobby, in which case it's a free pass time, with no subs, uniform or expensive kit.
We encountered our first brush with the law the other day. Our first foraging-related brush anyway- Roland's had plenty of police time devoted to him over the years.
I met Roland at Blackhorse Road station to do a recce of the area prior to filming for ITV the next day. I drew his attention to a Walnut tree poking over the top of a billboard just past the station and within seconds he was up the tree dropping Walnuts down to me below.
As he appeared to be drawing a crowd Roland decided to come back to street level, just in time for two friendly neighbourhood bobbies to drive past and see him coming down from behind the billboard. They stopped their van in the middle of the road and came over to us, brandishing their radios and notepads.
'You got a ticket for that train? I see you coming over that fence from the train, I wanna see your ticket'.
'We've got tickets', I said, handing them over. 'We were picking walnuts.'
I handed the green walnut to the taller, older of the two policeman, warning him that the juice might stain his hands. He held the walnut up to his face. He took my details and radioed through to the station for an ID check, all the while fixing me with a suspicious gaze and curling his lip. The ID check came through, and he looked deflated.
‘Where’s this Walnut tree then?’
I pointed. He continued to hold me with the curly lip stare.
'Oi!' shouted the younger officer, breaking my trance. 'He just took a picture of you Dave!' I looked to my left and Roland was photographing the scene on his mobile phone.
Officer Dave frowned. 'See, now I'm really angry (pronounced ‘veeeealy engvoy’). You don't know me, I don't know you, I don't want my fucking picture taken. I could nick you for terrorism. Who the fuck do you think you are? I’ve nicked people for less.' He took the phone and deleted the photos.
All the while, the traffic was building up behid their police van, and the parp of car horns building to a cacophony
We then had to walk away and not turn round, so he could ‘make sure we weren’t taking any other pictures.’
Walthamstow proving too problematic, we did the filming on Blackheath in the end. Roland couldn’t come so Tim gave me a hand instead. Spent about two hours filming on the heath, pretending to chance upon things and harvest everything in sight. Then we went to Greenwich Park and our recipes were tasted by Richard Harden of Harden’s food guide, who was most complimentary and enthusiastic!
It was aired on Saturday on London Tonight. We were introduced as people who ‘shunned the supermarket’, allegedly as part of some beardy-weirdy cooperative called the ‘London Foragers’. Anyway, inevitable alliteration and misrepresentation aside, it was a fun experience, the journalist and cameraman were good company and the weather was perfect.