Last things & puffballs

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I was wandering about yesterday - dazzling autumn sunshine & slanting shadows across the verdant green fields around me - mooching for fungus and pondering. I'd spend the earlier part of the day thinking about the meal of wild mushrooms I'd eaten the night before and asking myself, 'How do I feel?'

Seriously asking one's self the question 'Do you feel alright?' always leads to the answer, 'Well, now that you mention it, in some ways, no' - so I'd of course gone straight to the 'Poisonous' section of my mushroom book and stocked my head anew with the colouful and excruciating ends that may befall the forager who stumbles, uninformed, across the Death Cap, Panther Cap, Sickener or - God forbid! - Destroying Angel. I worked myself into a fair old state.

So I was taking a walk in the afternoon sun (possibly my last, I mused) thinking about all this and peering down at the grass - when it occurred to me that eating wild mushrooms and shooting rabbits for the pot had something in common besides both being sourced from the fields.

Which is to say: death.

If you shoot a rabbit and things go well (for you, of course, that is) it dies. You kill it, cook it and then you eat it. The demise of the rabbit is an integral part of getting it to the table; death is an element of shooting & eating rabbit.

And mushrooms? Well, you might say, this is where the analogy falls down - since if anything death is surely something to be most strenuously excluded from the experience of eating wild mushrooms. And yes, of course it is - but I'd argue that it's still there, nonetheless. There as a kind of central and necessary reference point around which the whole question revolves: these ones are tasty, these ones are less so and these ones will kill you stone dead - so beware.

Just as it is with shooting & eating rabbits, so it is with gathering wild mushrooms: there's eating - and there's death. The elements aren't conjugated in the same way - but they're there just the same. There are, if you like, different plus and minus values ascribed to the elements ('eat', 'die') in the different equations: the rabbit must die if you are to eat it; you eat mushrooms but must not yourself die.

So, yes; actually, it was a rather cheerful walk. I arrived back home feeling much better and put the whole idea of sudden death behind me.

Today, sitting down outside my flat to smoke, I thought about the fields at the bottom of my road. I very rarely go there since I don't have permission to shoot on the land - but there's a public footpath and people and dogs pootle across it all the time. What the hell, I thought, I'll smoke in the field instead.

I stepped over the fence and within fifty yards had found a fine Giant Puffball which I promptly uprooted and took home for tea. This one, I know, won't kill me.

Bon appétit!
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