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