When Toby was a child, he used to ramble over the South Downs with his siblings and pick lallies. Lallies are berries, any berry really, which you can pop in your mouth when no-one is looking. As a child, I used to sneak up to our vegetable patch and pick bucketfulls of lallies from the huge wall of cultivated blackerries which grew there. It was never that much of a secret: my hands were always purple-black with crushed berry juice by the time I returned, and there was always a fair amount of said juice staining my lips.
In fact, I owe far more than just a hppy childhood to lallies: it was while lally-picking in an ancient, rambling and wistfully beautiful Mulberry tree in Clifton two years ago that Toby produced a ring and asked me to marry him. Lallies are lovely.
Lally picking is still one of the most marvellous things a gardener can secretly do. My autumn-fruiting raspberries have been producing a great deal of fruit over the past month, and there’s nothing better in the mornings than sneaking down into the potager while my porridge is cooking, and picking five lallies. And then, childlike, I place one on each finger, and nibble them off. Lallies really are lovely.
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