100 YEARS OLD AND STILL FORAGING FRUITFULLY...

OF ALL the gin joints in all the world, a cemetery around the corner from Mile End Tube station in East London was surely the least likely for me to walk into. Yet that was what I did on Friday the 13th and it was a thoroughly enlightening experience.

We’ll come to the gin in a moment, but first let me set the scene. The location was the Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park and my guide was a charming and highly knowledgeable fellow called Ken. The park, he explained, began filling with graves in 1841 but more recently, when there was no more room for coffins, it was taken over by the local authority as a place to get away from the bustle of city life.

So successful has that been, that it is now highly popular among peaceseekers, wild food foragers and anyone interested in bats and butterflies. But it was the foraging aspect that Ken had promised to enlighten me about.

Look, I said the gin would come later. Just be patient.

As I walked along the path, Ken drew my attention to the wealth of edible plants growing between the graves. I started by sucking the nectar from white dead nettle and eating the flower and leaves, then continued with clove roots which I am told will keep away evil spirits.

Then came garlic mustard and sweet violet, and cranesbill, which tasted of green peas, and ground ivy and cow parsley and salad burnet and wild rocket and ribwort plantain, finally ending at the juniper tree and a blackthorn bush from which we picked some sloes.

Now do you see where we are going? Juniper is the essential flavouring of gin; add sloes for sloe gin and that was what had lured me to this unlikely gin joint. For the good folk of Hayman’s Gin had invited me along to meet Ken and learn more about their drink.

I must confess that for most of my life, my view of gin was formed mainly from William Hogarth’s picture of the evils of Gin Lane in 1751. After seeing that at a young age, I vowed to myself never to become one of the doomed gin-sozzled classes and it was only recently that I actually tasted the stuff and realised that it is not bad at all.

So back in the cemetery, I found myself pricking sloe berries with a needle to break their skin, dropping them into a jar and when the supply of berries was exhausted I watched as a bottle of Hayman’s dry gin was poured over them.

I had already taken a sip of the gin to appreciate its delicate blend of 10 perfectly balanced spices and I had also sipped some of their sloe gin to see what a difference the sloes would make. It was rather delicious and quite a revelation, especially after going on such a healthy vegetarian walk, nibbling plants on the way.

I am told that I must now wait a month or three for my picking and pricking to take effect and fully release the sloe flavour. Sugar will then be added to counteract the bitterness of the berries and around the new year, I shall be delivered a bottle of my own, healthily foraged sloe gin. As I said, waiting for the gin needs patience.