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There is nothing complicated about a bramble. There it sits, clinging to life, prickles at the ready. Hack and dig and haul and it will yield, but it will take a piece of you with it. Ouch.

So on Blue Monday, Brother Weatherman and I did battle with our Sainted Sister’s brambles, and this was a good thing. In a world gone mad, it is good for the soul to deal with brambles and nothing else. It was supposed to be the most miserable day of the year, but we were not miserable. Quite the opposite. We were in the crisp Cornish air, the dogs were positively gambolling, and we were making our Sainted Sister’s garden a garden again by removing brambles.

And there were ducks quacking. Our Sainted Sister keeps ducks, you see, and I like ducks very much indeed. What I like is that it is impossible to walk past a quacking duck, and not say ‘quack’ right back at it.

Go on, try it. You have to say quack. So each time I wheeled a bramble-full wheelbarrow down the slippery slope to the bonfire corner, I said ‘quack quack quack.’ And the ducks looked at me and said ‘quack quack quack’. We were all very content. They wagged their tails, the dogs wagged their tails, dammit, I wagged my tail.

Clearly, we all need more brambles in our life. They not only give healthful exercise in the clean air and are the cause of a happy day of positive work and achievement, they are also helpfully Symbolic.

Spiky, hurtful, tenacious, but, for one tiny period in the year, a giver of great good things in the oh-so-tasty shape of their blackberries. Is the gain worth the pain? How true of so many things in life…

I suppose the only cloud on the horizon came in the shape of my feet. I can’t walk as well as I used to, you see. On slippery mud or, this morning, on slithery ice, I walk like a cat on a hot tin roof, mincing, hopping, wincing.

I never used to be afraid of falling, but now I’m nearing half a century on this rock, I have discovered that I no longer wish to fall over, and this has given rise to the aforesaid mincing.

I regret this. Last Saturday, I parked in Liskeard on a car park that turned out to be covered in sheet ice. Everybody else strode confidently across it, whistling a merry tune. I tiptoed in agonising slow motion, looking as terrified and reluctant as Iain Duncan Smith will look when he approaches the Pearly Gates at his day of judgment.

As soon as I let go of the brambles today, the world got at me, spikier than any bramble thicket. The news. The politics. And then the cares. The children. Here I am now, after a six-hour shift of entertaining, cooking, reading, playing, cajoling, ordering, listening, helping, etc, etc, etc, and they have finally repaired to their bedrooms and stopped the incessant asking. I have furnished Son Number One with his great-grandfather’s medals for his World War Two project homework, and I have read the stories of Captain Underpants to Son Number Two. I have had no lunch yet and I am tired and it is 9.15pm. I am still almost sober.

But. But while I can still manfully grasp a spiked bramble branch and haul in a confident manner while quacking at the top of my voice, there is hope. Bring me brambles. Quack.