When life gives you strawberries

I rescued what may well be the last of this year's strawberries. Extreme heat and some sort of crawly things are finishing them off.  By the end of day three the children are complaining. "What's for pudding?" Max asks at 7:30 in the morning.  I tried to counter the obsessing about food by posting a monthly menu on the fridge, but it didn't occur to me to detail puddings.
"Strawberries." I hazard. It is half way through the month and there is no more money, so eating from the meagre front garden is a way of providing them with vitamins.
"Oh, not again." he sighs as he finds them secreted in his lunch box as well.

I honestly never remember complaining about the surfeit of strawberries in my life.  When we get in, I ask Pip and Rex to pick the fruit from the front garden, but after 35 seconds it is too warm and they both slink into the house to sit in darkened rooms with screens.  They're also really rubbish and I discover a good 2 tubs full.  It's like finding tiny red treasure.  But many of them are really little now, and very red, so they need to be picked.  Pip ignores any of the small strawberries and sees them as a sacrifice she must donate to slugs, snails and any other night spirits.

I freeze a tub for cake later in the year, leave some in the fridge, then sift through for the little ones, the slightly squishy ones, the ones that I managed to decapitate in the picking, the weird seedy ones and the cleft ones.  The ones the children might turn their noses up at.  And I make them into jam.

It's beautiful, the smell of jam brings me back to my childhood and my mum still makes much better strawberry jam than I do.  I remember small dabs setting on plates and there was always a small pyrex dish left over- the portion that didn't fit neatly into all the jars that would be stored for the rest of the year that we could have straight away, a bit too hot, the occasional semi-complete strawberry sitting in the pink nectar; the perfect sweetness and stickiness.  I've pimped my recipe - though not today - with cucumber and mint from the garden and a bit of Pimms. It's my version of the champagne jam I was bought at Christmas from Fortnum and Mason.  I like Pimms more.

And so this week I will make strawberry tarts, after my mum's recipe again, shortbread cases with a spoon of jam, a dab of cream and half a strawberry wedged on top.  For breakfast I will have homemade yogurt with homemade jam and home grown strawberries.  All made from the rejects, the too small, the ugly strawberries in my garden, that would otherwise have been contributed to the journey of life acting out in my 5x4 plot. 

There's something here, another message that I am trying to draw from this. I'm not sure what it is though, but the potential for allegory was too good to miss.

It might be something to do with examination marking I have completed every year for GCSE, drawing out every possible mark for the weaker students, taking twice as long to mark the shorter answers than the longer ones, making the effort to pick out as much credit as I possibly can, looking beneath the leaves for the flashes of red in the undergrowth, the sparks of interpretation and understanding beneath the confusion of poor handwriting and grammar.

Perhaps it's the story of Max, again, having almost completed a year of secondary school and sinking beneath the leaves of normality. He could be the funny-looking strawberry, the one that everyone ignores for the better, bigger, brasher strawberries, but he is as sweet as any other child.

Maybe I could have made this an an allegory for the General Election and the significance of voting.  Look at May's slim majority, and the small number of votes that were needed in some constituencies to topple or to preserve an MP.  The teeny tiny strawberry could be the vote that was needed to make a difference, on our own we don't feel important, but together we make good jam, and the jam lasts longer than the fresh strawberry promises that rot quickly if you're not careful.

Do I have a point? Details matter, effort matters. All of us can skim the surface and not engage with the deeper issues, pretend it does not concern us, but every element is significant.  6 months ago I was writing about the  year of the snowflake, and the fact that many snowflakes make an avalanche.  Now it's strawberries.  Be more strawberry. Be sweet.