The sweet flavour of rosehips remembered

I have always been a fan of gathering the wealth of the hedgerows, although I may have been a little spoilt by the ready availability of sorrel, blackberries, raspberries and fraughans (the Irish word for little wild blueberries) along the little-used roads surrounding the farm where I grew up.
Even in London, I am not to be deterred from gathering nature’s bounty: gallons of elderflower cordial are the product of trips to the local graveyard; more recently I have eaten myself sick on mulberries ignored by everyone except the birds, the squirrels and me.
However, despite their beauty and nutritional value, rosehips have never tempted me. They are impressively high in vitamin C: when rationing was imposed in Britain during and after the second world war, children were expected to gather them to make rosehip syrup to ward off scurvy, in lieu of the citrus fruit that was virtually unavailable.
Their flavour is tangy but not too sharp, often a welcome ingredient in herbal tea to balance the insistently herbaceous hibiscus and they grow almost everywhere.
So why are they not top of my scavenging menu?
It’s the guts of the fruit that put me off.
At my primary school in Ireland, there were wonderful sprays of rosehips gracefully draping themselves over the school wall into our playground every autumn term. And every autumn term, some bright spark would pluck a dark red fruit, split it open with a fingernail, scrape out the furry, fibrous seeds inside and use this pale stuff as horribly effective itching powder. In the end there were always tears, the teacher would get involved and punishment and bannings from the playground would ensue.
It’s probably silly to pass up on all the hippy goodness of the fruits, but I don’t think I could dissociate their flavour from the prickly, itchy feeling of fibres that are so firmly lodged in the fabric of your t-shirt that it can even survive washing.
In fact, I am even now shifting uncomfortably in my chair and furtively scratching my back where I can feel the phantom rosehip seeds.
Nostalgia is a fine thing, but it can be over-rated.