In my memory, the hazy golden summers of the 80s smell of cut grass and taste of strawberries – strawberry picking, strawberry teas, sickly strawberry splits; softer and sweeter than the glossily handsome fruit I buy today, and forever teetering on that fine line between ripe and rotten. Strawberry jam, with its mushy, slightly leathery fruit and syrupy flavour, always takes me back to those sunburnt days, when rollerskates were supercool, and summer fruit came with a lurid scoop of Gino Ginelli rather than a sprinkling of black pepper.
In jam form, of course, the strawberry is the perfect compliment to those other stalwarts of the rose-tinted picnic rug of summers past, the scone and the Victoria sponge. And, like both those things, the homemade version is infinitely better than anything you can buy in the shops; less sugary, more fruity, and above all, sticky with good old-fashioned nostalgia – and what could be more British than that?