I know how and when it started. [Hovis music, please] I'd gone out brambling with my friend and for every fruit we put in our tubs, we popped on in our mouths. When our stomachs were full, my friend and I said our goodbyes and went home. I put my big tub of brambles on the draining board and went off and filled an hour or so with some basic, mundane, but highly important usual teenage stuff. When I went back into the kitchen I noticed the brambles were covered in maggots (probably not as many as I remember there being. I think time has exaggerated the images). Now, remember I said I'd been eating them?
It freaked me out, to say the least, and when my parents came home a couple of hours later, they found me a quivering wreck, on the sofa - with my feet up (and if you knew that feet on the sofa were strictly forbidden, you would realize just how traumatized I was by the maggots). Anyway, for the next 10 years or so I avoided brambles, blaming it on a fear of maggots. Then it slowly dawned on me, after coming across maggots, that I wasn't actually afraid of maggots. So off I went to pick some brambles. And couldn't.
And in the end I had to admit it was a stupid, irrational fear of brambles. So, every year since, I have tried to take myself out to pick brambles. And every year, but one, I have failed to do it. The one year I succeeded was when I took my OH and children with me (this was a couple of years before my youngest was born). We picked a lot of brambles that year, and ended up throwing them all away. None of them have eaten brambles since. 
Anyway, this year - THIS YEAR - I have done it. I have gone out, on my own, and picked exactly 100 brambles. Well, I picked more, but I only put 100 in my bag. I brought them home. Washed them, soaked them, washed them again, soaked them in salt water, rinsed them - twice, soaked them and rinsed them again before I would let my 4-year-old eat a few. The rest are in the freezer in the hope that I can pluck up the courage to eat some myself at a later date. But for now, I feel like I've been really brave.
. The first time my boyfriend (now hubby) had a meal at our house and Mum cooked meat and three veg she accidentally included an extra meat portion - a green caterpillar on the cauliflower 
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