I dropped some cherry tomatoes - should I pick them up?

Before I get to the point of this blog, I need to paint a picture...

We live in the verdant Cornish countryside, overlooking a weaving valley, atop a small hill in a 170-year-old cottage that stands solid due to its four-foot-thick stone walls.  There are twelve neighbouring properties, each of which feeds and waters at least one cat. Cats do what cats do: sleep, prowl, preen, hunt, spray what they consider to be their territory (although the Land Registry says it's ours) - and poop. They also test each other's bravado - usually at night, always loudly and more often than not, right underneath our bedroom window.

Birds, it seems of almost every British variety, have made their presence known if not in aerobatic display then in song. I say song - most are beautiful, uplifting, relaxing, delightful. Some are simply annoying. Crows. Baby buzzards. They glide by, high up in the sky. Or they swoop and flit closer to the ground. Or they crash about in fumbling amorousness on the telephone wires ( Wood Pigeons ). And birds do what birds do - poop. Bats. There are long disused lime kilns at the bottom of the hill in which we suspect an indefinable number (cos we're certainly not going in there to find out) of bats suspend themselves during daylight hours. They entertain with marvellous swooping displays at and after dusk - and, it can't be ignored - poop.

We are cosseted by woodland, bushes, shrubs and weeds that have clearly burrowed through the Earth's crust to imbibe from an underground lake containing an ocean-going-liner-full of plant-specific steroids.Within our legally defined boundaries of ludicrous plant growth , a billion insects and arachnids crawl, wriggle, scurry, flutter, fly, hop and slither - yes, slither. More than one slow worm has surprised the wife. At night, particularly a wet night, slugs and snails, to the background orchestrations of a greater variety of grasshoppers and crickets as I have ever seen, make achingly slow progress from A to B : some the size of a Cuban cigar. It is not possible to go for an evening stroll without crunching down on an unfortunate snail or squelching down on a Cuban cigar (unfortunate or not, who cares?).

It's brief, but I hope that has described our location. 'Rural' doesn't seem quite emphatic enough. To us, it feels more than rural - Jurassic perhaps. But then we've never lived anywhere quite like this before. The cottage is tiny. So small that our American-style refrigerator ( you have to say 'refrigerator' after 'American-style' ) has no place in our kitchen. It has been relegated to the stone outbuilding. This is not as inconvenient as at first it may seem - the outbuilding is a mere eight feet or so from our front door which leads straight into the kitchen. I was bathed in the light of our fridge ( allowed as 'American-style' not mentioned ) gathering salad items. Happy with an armful, I left the outbuilding carrying lettuce, peppers, coleslaw, spring onions and... cherry tomatoes. And this brings me to the point of this blog...

I DROPPED THE CHERRY TOMATOES! An entire punnet! They leapt from my arm, totally unaided by me, leaving their chums behind without a care.The feeble plastic punnet hit the ground as my eyes widened and my jaw began to drop. It exploded in a profusion of tiny red bouncing bombs. Choice words expressing my dismay left my lips and floated off down the valley. I stared in disbelief as they rolled off in all directions. Some made it as far as the greenhouse, some the garden gate. Others, seemingly less interested in the potential for new life, simply lodged under the front doorstep. I was dumbstruck. I carried the remaining salad items into the kitchen less they should decide to follow, setting them down safely on the worktop.

Should I go out there and pick them up? The sweet little red fruits, so vital an element to my salad, the essential accompaniment to my smoked chicken risotto. Those lovely juicy balls bursting with flavour that have rolled and gambolled over the ground? Ground that has been pooped on by birds, bats, cats and insects. Ground that has been slimed by snails and Cuban cigars. Ground that has been lolled over by lazy toads. Ground that has seen incontinent mice and shrews dart and swerve in avoidance of a feline swiping paw. Ground that has borne the footfall of residents and visitors carrying God knows what on their footwear. Should I?

I didn't. I left them. My salad would be incomplete. Mild disappointment. Not only in the flavour and colour so obviously lacking but in the effective loss of the 82p that they had cost - not forgetting the time invested in carefully selecting them from the several hundred on display at Morrison's. I had only benefited from four of the little chaps on the previous evening. That left twenty or so sniggering quietly in the garden. I could have gone out there to pick them up. I could. But it was dark and I didn't fancy a tomato hunt by torchlight.

My only consolation is that maybe, just maybe, one or two of them might find the conditions in the garden conducive to reproduction. Their tiny seeds could find their way to accommodating soil, grow big and strong and compensate me for their outrageous behaviour with a vine full of their offspring. That is, if I could ever find them in the garden so well disguised with trees, weeds, bushes, shrubs, flowers, firs, roses...