Writing for life

Published in the WOW! supplement of the Evening Echo 10/10/2007

“Yipee it’s autumn,” shouted one of the twins. “I love autumn.”

It was a blustery early October morning. As we waited for the school bus the wind plucked curling brown leaves from the boughs of the ash tree overhead. They spiraled earthwards, and as they came into reach the girls tried to catch them.

I shivered. It wasn’t so cold, really, but the wind had a bitter edge: a hint of winter that somehow managed to make you feel colder inside than you actually where on the outside. Over the weekend we lit the fire for the first time since spring, and had to turn on the heating to take the chill off the girl’s bedrooms at night.

Suddenly the nights are closing in. It’s dark outside when the girls go to bed, and when we get up in the morning, pulling the blinds yields not daylight, but a dirty-grey pre-dawn gloom. For the first time in what seems like ages we’re sitting around the breakfast table with the lights on.

Still, for all it’s downsides, like the girls I quite enjoy autumn. It’s a season of tremendous natural beauty, and bounty. Although the weather is a bit unpredictable, fine autumn days with their soft, eerily tranquil light can be simply sublime. Our native trees, if you manage to find any, are replete in their autumn splendour, and our hedgerows and woodland are full of fruits, nuts, seeds and fungi. Nature’s larder is full to the brim, and everywhere you look there are birds, animals and the occasional enterprising gourmet, scrambling to make the most of this brief time of plenty before winter grips the countryside in her icy embrace.

Wild food – there’s simply nothing like it. It’s free, fresh and delicious. We’ve been feasting on blackberries for what seems like months, and there are still a few patches ripening in our local hedgerows. Apples, too, are in plentiful supply, but mushrooms seem to be pretty thin on the ground this year.

When it comes to gathering fungi for the frying pan, I tend to stick to the regular field mushroom. Last year the children got me a guide to mushrooms and toadstools for Christmas, and we’ve been down the local woods a few times over the last month or so looking for specimens we can identify. There are some wonderful edible species highlighted in its pages – and some equally worrying poisonous varieties.

Raiding nature’s larder is great – but with fungi you need to be absolutely certain what you’re eating. Get it wrong and you could be in for a very uncomfortable time – get it very wrong and it could kill you.

So many species in the book look remarkably similar, and variation between individual mushrooms means that what you’re looking at never looks exactly like the one in the book. It’s dangerously easy to make a mistake.

It’s a bit off putting when you look up a species in your mushroom field guide, see that it’s not only edible, but apparently delicious, and then read the warning “easily confused with the deadly poisonous XYZ species, which occurs in similar habitats at exactly the same time of year… see page 171”. You turn to page 171 and there is a fungi that looks almost identical to the first. The one you’re trying to identify falls, inevitably, somewhere between the two.

Better to adopted a “look but don’t touch” policy for any fungus we’re not absolutely sure about. We still go out scouring the woods for them though – and the girls are becoming adept mushroom spotters. Their sharp young eyes often see things that I miss. They love looking up what they’ve found in the book and putting a name to it – even if we can only be about 60% sure that we’re right.