Warm raspeberries and cold lemonade ................ out from Peckkam on another adventure

Now there is something about eating warm raspberries on a summer’s day in July.

Better still if they are accompanied by a bottle of cold lemonade.

And with those two you have all you need to make a new adventure something special.

Today of course the raspberries come ready packed and chilled from the supermarket fridge and taste nothing like those collected in the wild.

We had taken a train ride out to Epsom Downs with no clear idea of what we would find at the end of the journey and now a full 63 years after we set out I can’t remember much, other than the raspberries and the station.

But in the way these things work one powerful memory slides back into place and that was the smell of oil on wooden sleepers gently cooking in the heat.

And it was hot, so much so that we never even bothered to make our way out towards the race course.

Instead we sat on the grass island, and undisturbed by other passengers and in the silence listened to the odd bird song only interrupted by a set of bees working their way through a bunch of nearby flowers.

I have always wanted to go back and recreate that moment, but the station closed in 1989 and was  re sited 300 yards to the north east to make way for a housing estate.*

So not perhaps the most exciting of adventures especially as I suspect the lemonade was no longer cold, but it beat the day we ended up near the canal on a very wet spring day.

Picture; raspberries from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Epsom Downs, Disused Stations, http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/e/epsom_downs/index.shtml