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FORAGING: Food for free? Very compatible to the times we're living in. Things aren't quite so bad that we need to forage for food . . . but then again, it's certainly a good skill to cultivate in this season of mellow fruitfulness. Just be sure to have a good field guide in your pocket

ANYONE WHO HAS ever spent an autumn afternoon blackberry-picking knows the joy of foraging. That pile of shining, beautifully imperfect berries, with their tart, mouth-puckering flavour - each one slightly different - trumps the bland, pristine supermarket variety every time. But it's not just about your cache of hedgerow treasures. There's satisfaction in the seasonal ritual of the thing, in the absurd contortions you have to get into to reach the fattest, juiciest berries, always tantalisingly out of reach, and in coming home "peppered with thorn pricks . . . palms sticky as Bluebeard's" as Seamus Heaney has it.