Púca Time

Wild blackberries. A great free crop on most roadsides in Ireland. Good for eating, jam making or with a little sliced apple, for wonderful pies.
However, they come with a curse. The curse of the Púca. According to a legend going back to a time nobody knows when, it is said that on the Autumn pagan feast of Samhain, the blackberries are cursed by the mythical Púca and are no longer fit to be eaten. Awful sickness and calamity will visit anyone who dares to break the curse.
Personally, I think that it was simply a tale told by parents in order to stop their offspring eating berries which at the end of the fruiting season are likely to be either mildewed or, worse still, infested with nasty maggots, the larvae of certain flying creatures.
No matter what I feel, I shall not be picking and eating any of these after next weekend feast which is now known in these post pagan and  over commercialised times as Halloween. Sometimes though I feel that we live in an even more pagan age than ever.