I went out to the garden in the rain this morning to pick a handful of raspberries for my cereal and found myself wondering how Sam's were doing on his allotment. Every year we chat about strawberries and raspberries and then later on blackberries and cooking apples. I'd never really thought of Sam as being a soft fruit man but it was one of those many diverse subjects that our interests overlapped on. I suppose that's why in the thirty five years I knew him we always had so much to talk about.