WE'VE certainly been short-changed with the weather this year.

It seems that the entire summer was spent sitting in the garden for a maximum of three minutes until the next shower arrived, forcing light-deprived souls such as myself to dive for cover under the clematis.

Although it is only his second year of existence, Peter is also fed up, too. His living quarters have taken quite a battering over the last few months, so I decided he was due for a house move.

Realising that even bunches of groundsel and sow thistle were no longer sufficient to placate him, I resolved to buy the lad a new hutch from those delightful people at Bunnyland on Worcester's London Road.

I settled for a middle-range dwelling, and within a few hours, the structure was delivered to Dun Subbin. It will probably be accorded Band D status when it comes to council tax liability, ho-ho.

Yes, I joke. However, many a true word was said in jest...

Anyway, with inclement weather such as has been the norm of late, his new abode really is quite something. Featuring two rooms, comprising lounge and en suite bedroom/bathroom, the new residence seems to have been given the paws-up.

Animals, like humans do seem to be affected by the vagaries of the weather. But it is the life-restricting nature of inclement conditions that really starts to irritate, so I was delighted when a recent Sunday dawned fine and sunny.

And that meant only one thing. Seize the moment and give the blackgogs a good hammering.

I must apologise. Once again, I need to translate this curious north Warwickshire patois into English. For your information, a "gog" is a berry, as in "goosegogs". So you can work it out.

Now, as every seasoned gog-picker knows, you can't pick the flavoursome little devils when wet. They break up between your fingers, and as well as collecting just a bag of purple-black mush, one's hands are stained beyond redemption.

So, fine conditions are a necessary pre-requisite before an expedition into the blackberry plantations of wildest Worcestershire. Besides, this is supposed to be a pleasurable experience. After all, we're not exactly talking about the beet-harvesting scene in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, oh no.

Well, I have a favourite spot. But I must confess my greatest fear is that other pickers will have arrived before me, stripping the bushes of the best fruit. Yes, it does sound daft, irrational, even.

However, this trait is probably hereditary.

My maternal grandmother was known as The Mad Blackberry Woman of Hearsall Common.

Many years ago, this was an open space in what was then a fairly posh area of Coventry. She was known to have defended many a prime picking site from interlopers with choice words aimed at anyone so foolish as to stray into her territory.

This is not an unfamiliar human characteristic - witness the fervour and greed at car boot sales, flea markets and the like. It's the same with blackberries. The early bird and all that.

However, in recent years, there has been hardly any competition down in the bramble patch. For although I've been on several expeditions this year, not once have I encountered any rivals.

Quite depressing, really. Nobody seems to go blackberrying anymore... another simple pleasure that seems to have been forsaken for other distractions.

In the scheme of things, this probably doesn't register much on the Richter Scale of what's important.

But it's yet another depressing sign of the times in a world that is increasingly being ruled by machines, computers, junk food and obsessive consumerism.

The result is that no one seems to be interested in gathering food for free. But once, it was very different.

When I was a village lad, during the impossibly far-off 1950s and 60s, most people were partial to a bit of Freeman's.

I recall that late summer and early autumn was the most productive period, fungi and berries of various species being available.

Before the Yuppies sent the cost of a cottage spiralling into fiscal orbit, many a farm labourer or factory worker augmented the family budget by indulging in a bit of extra-curricula harvesting.

Some of it was legal, much was semi-legal and a very small percentage was definitely illegal.

Mushrooms were picked at the discretion of the landowner, and nobody missed the occasional pigeon downed by a rusty old .410.

But rabbits (sorry Peter) could be a different case.

I remember, as a young reporter, covering the court hearings of people who had been charged with "going equipped for the taking of coneys".

I haven't seen that offence mentioned for years, let alone a report in any newspaper.

If there was a river nearby - and in our case, there was a tributary of the Avon at the bottom of the hill - it was not unusual to see someone walking up the village street carrying a pike home.

The awesome jaws of the fish would be wide apart, frozen open in death, head to one side as a result of being unceremoniously suspended in a loop of baling twine threaded through one of its gill covers.

For those of you who might be tempted to recoil in horror at such an ignominious end to old Esox Lucius, ponder on the origins of that freezer full of assorted meats in your kitchen or garage. Quite. Today, we live in a society where penury is only relative.

There is no such thing as poverty now, certainly not in the sense of the real hardships endured by people as recently as the first decade after the Second World War.

Present-day poor people live off junk because it's the soft option. For whatever reason - sometimes choice, rarely necessity - sufficient time is not devoted to the question of food.

Much of the barely-edible rubbish, the remains of which can often be observed covering our pavements, is not particularly cheap. But it is readily available.

Too many distractions now compete for our time. The body's requirements are regarded as merely fuel... it's no different to a car filling up with petrol. There's no enjoyment, eating is just something that needs to be endured, to be completed as soon as possible.

The parents, and certainly the grandparents of the present Obesity Generation, may not have had any money, yet their diet was far superior in nutritional terms. Ask them. They will have no shortage of deprivation stories...

My picking expedition was a great success, delicately lacerated hands and forearms testifying to the wiles of the thorny tendrils that can so efficiently snare the unwary.

And now the old blackgogs have given out, a fungi hunt is next.

But I'm not sure what young Peter thinks. The last time I saw him this morning, he was demolishing what was probably, in rabbit terms, a delicacy.

But don't worry, old hare, that sow thistle stalk is all yours.

However, if we'd been talking blackgogs, then that would have been a very different matter indeed.

They're mine!