Hips

These rose hips have for me an unshakeable association with my childhood. For the past forty years or so I've become used to the fat red hips of Rosa Rugosa, which we have in our garden and from which in our penurious thirties we used to make wine. But in me Glasgow childhood we would often take the train out to Milngavie at the September weekend holiday and walk out along the Blanefield road and look at the signs of Autumn that were more exciting than the swirl of brown leaves in city streets. It was then that I saw these shiny, hard, oval hips gleaming on their bare branches.

I seem to recall also that there was some mystique attached to the seeds inside these hips - itchycoos, that caused dire itch if pushed down inside the collar of an unsuspecting victim.

I haven't tried it this year .