I can’t decide whether or not to sign my children up to the Cub scouts. On the one hand, they’re exactly the kind of kids for whom lessons in knot tying and a badge-based achievement system are totally thrilling prospects. Then again, we’re already locked into football and swimming classes, alongside a punishing homework regimen, and can collectively do without another weekly commitment.
Added to this are my own lukewarm experiences of scouting life – less abseiling and sleeping out under the stars than failed papier-mache projects and saluting the flag. That said, the basics stay with you. Twenty-five years after I parroted “Be prepared” down at the church hall, I still carry two pens with me wherever I go and there are more screwdrivers, batteries and plasters in my house than that of anyone else in my peer group.
So, I tried to keep an open mind and did a quick cost-benefit analysis. And, in the process, I realised that the real reason I was holding back on any new activities was because I was worried about how much they might cost. I like to think I’m fairly adept at switching between my credit card and current account to manage our various outgoings, but as the kids get older, these costs are starting to snowball. I wanted to make sure that if I did end up in a hole, I was prepared to get out of it.
I grabbed a bit of time during my lunch break to look into a few credit card options on Compare the Market. Specifically, I wanted to check out balance transfer credit cards, which would give me the option of moving debt from one account to another that could offer me a lower interest rate and let me get back into the black were I ever to slip out of it.
Foraging in Finsbury Park
While Compare the Market’s offering of credit card info is as varied as a Swiss army knife, it’s far simpler to use, and I quickly found what I was looking for. The site has some handy blurb on how balance transfer cards work and the FAQs around them. Once I’d fed my basic requirements into the filter, I had a rundown of the products that might suit my needs the best, each with a mercifully comprehensible list of pros and cons.
Armed with my new rainy-day shortlist of cards, and warming a bit to the idea of the great outdoors, I decided to put my name down for a food foraging session in Finsbury Park organised by Capital Growth, a London-based food growing network. I’m a long-term fan of multi-Michelin star chef René Redzepi, whose restaurant – Noma in Copenhagen – is famous for using foraged ingredients. One of my favourite nature writers, Richard Mabey, has also written on the topic. And I thought serving the kids a dandelion salad or some nettle tea would be as good a way as any to test their enthusiasm for life in the wild.
The course itself was far from a sylvan scene. I was part of a group of about 20 foragers – conservationists, nutritionists, community garden volunteers and dilletantes like me – who gathered by the thump and flash of the funfair in the park’s south-west corner one Wednesday night. However, our guide Michael Stuart, a public health charity worker who said he only started foraging in his 50s but easily looked younger, was undeterred, plucking white dead-nettle and cleavers (good salad leaves both) through a gap in the fence and passing them round for us to taste.
“I have a sweet tooth,” Stuart says. “But foraging has taught me to embrace bitterness.” This is a good mindset to get into before eating dandelion leaves, yarrow or, unsurprisingly, bittercress, but it’s easier than you might expect. Within a few minutes I was plucking and combining leaves quite happily, congratulating myself on my adventurousness and discovering some real depth of flavour.
Looking for gorse; making notes on hawthorn; a map of the park
“The bittercress grows so low down you’ll want to wash it for dog pee,” Stuart chimes in while I’m chewing a particularly large mouthful. “Then again, urine won’t actually harm you.”
Good to know. As is the fact that benign and delicious cow parsley leaves bear more than a passing resemblance to hemlock, which is what finished off Socrates and, as Stuart describes, has the effect of slowly killing you from the toes up. Another risk is Japanese knotweed, which, while edible, is frequently treated with pesticides to stop it wreaking havoc with the local housing stock.
My personal highlight was discovering that gorse flowers – those pretty yellow ones that sprout from prickly bushes all over the countryside – taste a lot like coconut and can give a great dash of colour and flavour to a salad.
As the light faded, we retired to a garden run by community group Edible Landscapes for a meal made up with some of the various sprigs and blooms we’d plucked on our ramble and washed down with some delicious wild mint tea. It wasn’t quite a campfire jamboree, but the sense of enjoyment and satisfaction within our troop was palpable, and I left feeling pleasantly prepared for another expedition, with the kids in tow, in the near future.
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