"Not for the first time," he said, "I thought I'd make myself a good blackthorn stick. Not that I haven't a few decent walking sticks, not to mention thumbsticks, the best being from holly and one from a very old wild rose, a huge bush, which was later wiped out in one of those scarifying operations known as land drainage. Anyway, there were a fair number of blackthorns around, planted as quicks long ago in some cases, and, in the hedges not a few that had been there before me. It didn't seem any problem - that is, until you went around looking for a straight branch of suitable length and breadth. If you were the sort of patient person who can apply heat to a stick while it is held in a pair of joiner's vices, or even go through the process of suspending it from a beam in a warm room (or a room where heat can be applied directly, say by a fan) - and one writer says countrymen solved this by hanging it in the warmish cow byre - then fine. But if you want an instant stick of correct length and straightness, you have a problem. For in, say, a hundred bushes you will find many straight branches and offshoots, but some will not be long enough and if they are long enough they are not straight enough.
"Couldn't you let it have a slight bend in it? You'd better. For you won't find the ideal without a lot of patience. You need a knob as handle, which is best done by taking one straight from the root; otherwise hacking your stick from an offshoot of a biggish branch and sandpapering and cutting the thickness to fit the hand." So our friend had to do with a stick of appropriate length and thickness, but not dead straight. And the first thing he says about a blackthorn stick is that it is not black - unless so painted in the tourist shops. It is a sort of grey-green, no, a grey-brown. And the colours will vary, perhaps according to which side of the bush got most sun or some quality in the soil.
It has one distinguishing mark - the number of bumps which stood for the original thorns, now cut and smoothed to acceptable level. Back to the lack of straightness. Our friend recalled that here had been cattlemen in his family. The not-quite-straight element shows that the stick is a professional tool, good and rough enough (he's sorry he didn't leave a few more bumps in it) for prodding beasts. So, stick OK.