When I was a rebellious 17-year-old and had just been 'asked to leave' the boarding school that my parents had sweated blood and tears to send me to, I got a job on a local farm picking strawberries.
The working day started at 6am, requiring me to be out of the door and on my bicycle at 5.30, pedalling squeakily through the half-light of dawn to the strawberry fields of Surrey.
It was 1991 and it was a beautiful summer. My fellow workers were a true cross-section of humanity.
They ranged from working-class Home Counties housewives seasonally supplementing the family income to entire traveller families to a charmingly well-mannered shaven-headed ex-convict who had recently been released from a prison sentence for manslaughter.
I was the only Old Etonian. Although I was conscious that my studies of Latin, maths and French were being sorely neglected, working in the strawberry fields of Merstham was like cramming at the University of Life.
Best of all I was paid the extraordinary sum of £7 an hour - and this was 17 years ago.
But there was a catch. Our masters were unpredictable employers and pickers got fired with astonishing frequency - at the rate of three or four a week - for the most trifling offences.
The cardinal sin was eating the 'product'. In the eyes of the misanthropic supervisor, this was a double loss - both the paid-for time and the lost revenue from the 'stolen' strawberries.
My own love of strawberries was to be my undoing. Too often I found the temptation - especially the mouth-watering smell of them - irresistible.
Looking up cautiously from my back-breaking work - with the sun still low in the sky and rising over the giant strawberry fields which stretched for acres in all directions - I would craftily pop one into my mouth. The fruit tasted all the more exquisite for being forbidden.
The weeks passed. So many people got fired that soon I was an old-timer, but I made the mistake of thinking I was indispensable. I thought I was untouchable and I got sloppy. My strawberry eating became blatant and reckless.
It all unravelled one morning when I was caught by the supervisor lying down sunbathing between the rows of plants, headphones and sunglasses on, dipping a cartoon-sized giant strawberry that might have attracted premium prices at Harrods food hall into a pot of double cream I had smuggled into work in my bag.
'What do you think this is?' he screamed at me as all the other pickers stopped, put their hands on their hips and stretched out their backs to watch the show: '$%#^&*# Wimbledon?'
Sitting in the bath that afternoon, trying to get the red stains off my fingers and pondering what the hell I was going to do with my life, I made up my mind to go back to school.
But my love affair with strawberries continued unabated over the next decade and a half.
What I relished so much about them was not just their taste, but their associations.
A perfectly ripened strawberry, after all, is the symbol of that rare and idyllic thing, the hot and settled British summer.
And strawberries are synonymous with success, they indicate a measure of satisfaction with life.
We pile them into huge celebratory pyramids at weddings as signifiers and harbingers of good fortune. The media gleefully report how many overpriced tons of them we consume at national summer events like Wimbledon, Henley and Ascot.
The strawberry has a powerful association with sex as well. Scientists today say that its high levels of zinc make it a natural aphrodisiac, but the romantic allure of a plump strawberry has been recognised down the ages - an old English legend holds that if you break a large strawberry in half and share it with a member of the opposite sex, you will instantly fall in love.
There's a reason why Mickey Rourke chose to feed Kim Basinger strawberries - not raspberries - in front of the refrigerator in 91/2Weeks.
And the reason is that the raspberry, the humble country cousin of the fruity strawberry, is just not sexy.
For all these reasons it always seemed to me nothing more than quarrelsome perversity to assert the primacy of the raspberry over the strawberry.
It wasn't just their lack of sex appeal: the pips in raspberries get stuck between your teeth, raspberries are more likely to have bugs and flies in them, raspberries break apart too easily and end up as mush, raspberries don't stack and raspberries don't keep as well.
You can even serve strawberries as a starter with a dusting of icing sugar and pepper - try doing that with a raspberry.
But, above all, where the strawberry is bold and flashy - almost bling - the raspberry is a shyer, more introverted fruit.
If a strawberry were to go on holiday, it would fly first class to St Tropez and lounge around the pool sipping cocktails and working up a tan in a pink bikini and sunglasses.
A raspberry would prefer to load up the car and drive north of the border for two weeks fishing in Scotland.
And then, two years ago, we moved to the countryside and inherited a garden full of strawberry and raspberry plants. The first year of rural living was a scorcher - and the strawberries were magnificent. We were overwhelmed with fruit and I left the raspberries on the canes.
Last year, however, it poured with rain every day from May to September. This was bad enough - but what really ruined the summer for me was when the entire strawberry crop failed. I was heartbroken.
Poking around the garden one day in a break between downpours, I gloomily surveyed my miserable, mud-spattered strawberry plantation. Not even a lone strawberry had ripened sufficiently to be eaten.
But, then, out of the corner of my eye, a flash of pinky-red fruit at the bottom of the garden caught my eye. It was the long-neglected raspberries!
I found a pair of stout gloves and started pulling back the carpet of weeds that had grown over them.
Incredibly, despite the almost complete lack of sunshine, the raspberries had thrived. I forgot my former prejudices and began furiously picking.
Over the rest of the summer, I came to a glorious new appreciation of raspberries. I had seriously under-rated them. I think that my new found love of raspberries reflects a maturing of my palette.
The strawberry may get all the attention, but the raspberry, I have concluded, is a less boastful but more complex fruit.
Raspberries have a sharper flavour - by comparison eating a strawberry is like having a bucket of syrup dumped over your head.
From an amateur gardener's point of view, the raspberry trumps the strawberry every time as well. You don't need to net raspberries as the prickles do a fairly effective job of keeping the birds off. They love plenty of rain, which can be handy in our climate.
Yet, despite my new-found love of raspberries, I must admit I do still get a boost from the sheer sensual voluptuousness of a ripe strawberry, which inevitably takes me back to that first, ill-fated job half a lifetime ago.
Out of my office window I can see that the sun is coming out again. If it keeps up, it might just be enough to ripen up a few more of those strawberries. The raspberries will be dripping off the bushes as well. I'll get into the garden after work this evening, and fill two baskets, one with each fruit.
And after dinner, I'll set an equal amount of strawberries and raspberries in bone china bowls, dust them with caster sugar and pour on some thick double cream.
All that will then remain is to scoop up a spoonful, pop it in my mouth, and revel in the absolute deliciousness that always results when these two classic fruits come together, truly the yin and the yang of the British summer.
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