Blackberries

We shall probably finish off of the 2022 blackberry harvest today, with the last of them being used to make blackberry and apple, a dessert which suits us well. Not least because it is very cheap: blackberries from a hedge and apples from a neighbour. Will we now manage to spin out the rather thin 2023 crop until the 2024 crop comes on?

Other important matters arising include the rights and duties of jurors, as seen through the letters page of yesterday's Guardian. Contrary to what I had thought, jurors should not act according to their conscience as they have sworn, more or less, to uphold the law. Parts of which they may well conscientiously disagree with. No doubt the law around all this is a bit grey, but jury trial is clearly a good thing and it would be a pity if either side try to push it, try to push the boundaries. Let moderation prevail - or we might wind up with popular support for further restrictions on the right to jury trial.

In which connection I might add that I was never very comfortable with a Norfolk jury acquitting gm-warriors for trashing a field's worth of gm-maize, probably a matter of some thousands of pounds. One might well support the gm-warriors (which I do not), but if they embark on this form of protest, they should be prepared to take the consequences.

Then there is the matter of the (Carolina reaper) pepper eating challenge. A Canadian man has just smashed the world record by downing 50 of them in something under 7 minutes - and then going on to down another 85 of them for good measure. Apparently he has been doing this sort of thing for twenty years, leading one to wonder what sort of a state his stomach is in. He does admit to both oral and abdominal discomfort - not to say pain - in the course of his feats. Presumably the use of performance enhancing analgesics is frowned upon in sporting circles.

I close with the Serbs, who still seem to be bent on causing trouble in the Balkans, more than a hundred years after the Serb-flavoured assassination in Sarajevo sparked off the First World War. Except that, as ever, glib remarks are often economical with the truth - with reference 1 telling me that the actual assassins were Bosnian Serbs who wanted to set up a South Slav state. They were, however, helped in this by Serbian nationalists, some of whom were subsequently tried and executed by the Serbian authorities. All part of the fall-out of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. I wonder if Putin, a chap known to have pan-Slav tendencies, has it in mind to have another go in the Balkans when he has dealt with the Ukrainian problem?

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Archduke_Franz_Ferdinand.

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