Guzgogs

The former owner of our house had a reputation as a spiky character. We felt that the warm welcome we received from our new neighbours was tinged with a palpable relief that we were 'Not X'. The well-stocked, if a little runaway, garden came with a substantial gooseberry patch of very mature bushes. We heard stories that they were harvested in bulk, frozen, and consumed on a daily basis throughout the year. The fierce spines and acidic fruit seemed in keeping with the character description 

When we extended the house, the gooseberry patch was a casualty. One neighbour volunteered to take some of the bushes, though it cost him a broken spade digging out the roots - the departed resident's last farewell, perhaps. He replanted it just outside the boundary of both our gardens, on land owned by the brewery that he had extended his husbandry onto (this is the country - things are different here!) Those neighbours have moved on, and the young man who now lives there is a less assiduous gardener. The nettles and briars have reclaimed the brewery land - I make an annual incursion to beat them back from the two or three shrubs I have also planted 'over the wall' 

The brewery have recently strimmed 'the waste'. Today I clambered up to take a look at the old bush. It is embattled but not yet overcome. I decided it was just about worth reaching over our wall for a flowerpot. Once you start searching the bush systematically it is surprising how many you find - though at the cost of an armful of scratches and stings 

As a child we called them 'goosegogs', and in my childhood accent it was spoken as I have rendered it in the title. I wasn't sure how local the word was, but it seems to be in dictionaries as 'dialect', so I assume most people know it - though I haven't heard anyone say it for years. What I could not find in dictionaries was the word we used for preparing them for cooking. 'Top and tail' is the more usual phrase, but we used to say we "snuffed" them. Until today, I'd never thought about how curious that is - I can't find any online reference to the word having that usage. I've also realised it makes a kind of sense though - if you think about the action of removing the remains of the flower with your finger and thumb, it is a similar action to snuffing out a candle wick

I snuffed them all. Mrs M put a sponge topping on them and we opened the new 'Fior de Latte' ice-cream from the organic dairy herd where we buy our yoghurt. A sweeter dessert than those that used to be served here, I suspect