It's one of the charms of spring, after all, that we never can tell what the day will bring us. There is no time like Spring that passes by/now newly born, and now,/Hastening to die. That was Christina Rossetti. And last Saturday, while some rain fell on Dublin, there were five or six glorious hours of sunshine in North Meath. Why did we, as children, call the new leaves of hawthorn "bread and cheese"? and it wasn't just in Ireland. Richard Mabey in his magnificent Flora Britannica tells us that across the water from here these are also generally known as bread and cheese, but he has something to tell us. "This is usually explained as referring to their rudimentary culinary qualities. But some children have eaten the berries (whose flesh is a little like overripe avocado pear, or more fancifully, a whey cheese) together with the autumn leaves. These are just about edible, even in early October, and are certainly no worse that very stale bread". He quotes from one source: "We would pick the red berries and green leaves in the autumn. These were known as bread and cheese, the leaf the bread, the berry the cheese".
A more interesting use of the young leaves is the recipe given to Dorothy Hartley by a farm labourer's wife in Leicestershire in the 1930s. It was a "spring dinner", made by covering a suet crust with young hawthorn leaf-buds and thin strips of bacon, and rolling and steaming as roly-poly. Far from our thoughts it was, as we gnawed the sweet, soft, green buds. And the hawthorn is a study worthy of books and books, from the superstitions of the danger of bringing The May into the house, to the history of the famous Glastonbury Thorn and its origin attributed to Joseph of Arimathea. Anyway, spring is here, on and off in its usual way. On last Saturday, driving up through Meath, the fascinating sight, for: the passenger, be it said, was the continuity of rookeries, the sitting birds invisible from below, but everywhere, be the rookery big or small, at least one bird, rigid and dignified, sitting a few yards from the nearest nest. And some trees did have only half-a-dozen nests, while others were crammed with nests like a barn brack is with currants.
May they flourish. In a way, our national bird. And everything is on the move, even if barely. Look at the rowans in the curl of the unfolding leaf you can already see the tight-packed blossom pushing through. There is no time like Spring.