When you think of a book that has saved your life, people will often reach for the existential times of Kirkegaard, or Camus. I reach for ‘The Forager’s Calendar’ by John Wright, which in the heat of the blissful afternoon, saved me from eating deathly nightshade berries. Sweet and inviting as they looked, just like the bilberry to my untrained eye! I rooted around for the text and examined the pictures and descriptions closely. Not quite a bilberry, not matt enough or with the same leaf shape. No similar shining dark lobes of berries in August or July either! What could this be? With a final hope before popping the delicious black gems into my mouth I flicked to the ‘poisonous’ section at the back only to be forewarned of impending death. A bell-shaped flower, a single shiny dark berry in a star shaped cup! These were the deathly nightshade berries, and that cool day on the sloping green hills of Exmoor, still salivating with wild anticipation, I lived to forage another day.