‘Will we go blackberry picking, Mum’? he asks, mischief in his voice. Not waiting for an answer, he pulls open the deep kitchen drawer, the one full of ‘useful items’. He plunges his long arms into the mess of mis-matched Tupperware, burnt bottomed pots and lidless butter dishes.

‘Aha’, he cries as he bangs two old enamel trays on the counter before kicking the drawer shut with his foot.

‘Will we go now?’ he asks, eagerly clapping the trays together. Anticipating my response, he hands one to me, knowing what my answer will be.

I close my laptop, saving the work email I had been writing to the draft folder. Work that he is blissfully unaware of, knowing, as he has always known, that there is nothing more important in my life than him, his sister… and blackberries.

I tell the dogs we’re going out and slip the keys into my pocket, leaving my mobile phone behind me on the table. Blackberry picking with your son is no time for interruptions.

The berries, that have caused all the excitement, are only steps away. Hidden in the bushes that edge the green where he used to play football and build dens, and no doubt got up to greater divilment as his legs and ambitions grew longer.

He’s way ahead of me. His mouth and hands already stained by the juice of childhood memories. His tin remarkably empty, despite his speed in picking the succulent offerings that appear to have been patiently waiting just for us.

Heaney-like, my pickings sit ‘like a plate of eyes’ on my tray, and I smile as I watch him take a photograph of his purple laughing face in front of a bush heavy with fruit. An image, no doubt, already winging its way to ‘the lads’ and across the world to his sister, and early fruit picking partner, in Australia.

‘I’ll be off now, Mum,’ he says, stealing a berry from my nearly full tray, as he hands me his nearly empty one. His enthusiasm for this childhood pastime spent as he strides away, laughing at the reactions to the photograph already pinging into his phone. I pick another few berries as I slowly make my way home to the waiting work, the sleeping dogs and the quiet house.

He drives past, beeping the horn, and I wave at the back of his car. Knowing, as Seamus Heaney so beautifully said of children and blackberries alike, that ‘Each year I hoped they’d keep, (yet each year I) knew they would not’.