magic mushrooms

Last night we went down to the Demoiselles Coiffées to pick up cones for fire-lighters. In the dim of the low cloud the red sand castles stood erect like day-glo towers. The rain seemed to have washed the pine-green carpet and the wildlife to have hoovered it. It was cone-less and bright emerald. Suddenly J spotted the cream calfskin domes of a hamlet of horse mushrooms, their pure lilac undersides neatly fanning out like the pleats of a christening dress.

We were the first to see them (and the last, of course, as we picked them for our supper), and the miracle of how an apparently secretless patch of earth can be the scene of such a sudden birthing has stayed with me.

I keep hearing all the folk who have warned me:

'People don't change you know'

How many times have we heard:

"Once a smoker always a smoker" (I've said that)
"I've voted conservative all my life I'm not going to change now" (My grandmother said that)
"I'm just like this, you'll just have to put up with it if you want to live with me" (anonymous)
"I'm not the monogomous type" (a friend now happily married)
"The reason we are together is that neither of us ever want to have a child" (another friend now overjoyed to be pregnant)

Did the earth say: "I'm just a piece of earth. I'm not a mushroom and I never will be"?

Last night we decided to have an alcohol-free night of tea and toast. We held our bread to the fire (which we managed to start despite the lack of cones), made tea and fried up the mushrooms. Last night we were not a couple of lushes. I was still me, maybe more me, and we were still us.

It's amazing what can happen when we drop a habit, let go of what we think we are and allow ourselves a taste of mushroom magic.