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A couple of years ago, I found six or seven genuine, recognisable mushrooms
in a field. When I had mentioned the subject of recognition and its risks
in a much earlier column, a reader kindly invited me on a field course of
mushroom recognition, which I was unable to attend. But I knew what I had
found were mushrooms because they were exactly the same in appearance as
the big, flat ones on sale in the local market. Confidence is all. So I
took them home and cooked them. They tasted of disinfectant, so I threw
them away. A friend of whom I had given a sample, received with cries of
delight, assured me that they were delicious. ‘Mine tasted of Dettol,’ I
said. ‘So did mine,’ he said. ‘I threw them away.’ Since then I have noticed
fungi with a mixture of guilt and fear. According to articles and books,
every nation but the British is expert at tracking down the edible varieties,
whole populations of towns fanning out into the countryside at weekends
and coming back with baskets full of fresh food, washing it down at mushroom
fests with draughts of regional wine and then sleeping it off until Monday
morning. Meanwhile, I am down at the supermarket, putting white button,
incontrovertible mushrooms into a plastic bag and waiting in line for them
to be weighed.

There is one tree I know that every year has enormous flat-topped fungi
growing out of it just above the line of a ditch. It is possible that they
would move a dozen fingertip-kissing gourmets in Aquitaine to transports
or feed an Italian peasant family for a week. I slow down as I pass, in
reverential ignorance. No harm in a gesture.

Lately, I have been lent a book, called succinctly, Edible Fungi, and
published in wartime, perhaps to encourage people to forage for food and
spin out the rations. The author’s name is heartening enough – John Ramsbottom.
So I have been having an identity parade of its colour plates. Slinking,
shamefaced, out of the headquarters of the Mushroom Inspectorate, I have
failed to distinguish between Pleurotus ostreatus and Fistulina hepatica,
in spite of the assistance of the whispers in my ear of hints, such as ‘The
cap is at first convex with an inrolled margin. Did the cap spread out shell-wise,
eh?’ ‘The trouble is,’ I whine, ‘I didn’t really get a good look at it.
Besides, it changes colour. How am I to know what it was when it starts
black, then it’s slate or brownish black and may be blue or whitish or even
yellow? You can’t blame me.’

I have an idea that last year I was ankle-deep in Cantharellus cibarius
or chanterelle. This mushroom was mentioned in an 18th-century book which
had a legend on the title page in Greek, ‘We speculate on fungi, we do not
eat them.’ Chanterelles are supposed to occur in woods and mine were in
a field, their average width of cap was nothing like 4 inches and I certainly
didn’t notice whether the gills appeared to be markedly decurrent, a dead
giveaway, apparently. If they appear again this year I shall have a go at
them, after finding out what ‘decurrent’ means. They will probably taste
of Dettol.

* * *

The Reader’s Digest is offering me and, of course, countless others,
a book. And a chance of a new car and a possible bonus of 10,000 Pounds
and maybe more an a Mystery Gift if I get by reply back within seven days.
The book, as is true of all the Reader’s Digest books I have seen will be
beautifully designed and produced. This one is called Strange Stories, Amazing
Facts. ‘It’s a strange world,’ says the leaflet extolling it, ‘full of marvels,
myths and mysteries; facts, fallacies and fables.’

The contents include rehashes of stories that have been done, but not
to death, many times before. For instance, one of them is the old curse
of the mummy’s tomb nonsense. Atlantis makes its almost obligatory appearance.
But so do lasers and genetic engineering. The books seems to be a gallimaufry,
a ragbag, intended for those with short attention span and who are prone
to cry: ‘Cor!’, as the Reader’s Digest itself is. No doubt there is a place
for such books and considerable money to be made from them, but I deplore
the sales promotion that claims truth for the story entitled ‘One man –
in two places simultaneously!’

* * *

A recent issue of the Radiological Protection Bulletin carried an article
about two Russian reports about the events leading to the Chernobyl accident.
Although both were published in 1989 by the Moscow Political Literature
Publishing House one seems to be a propaganda exercise and the other a more
truthful and critical production by a nuclear engineer. For instance, the
first compares the Chernobyl accident only with those that have happened
in the West, while the second mentions other Soviet incidents and describes
the installing, maintaining and operating of reactors as ‘a hair’s breadth
away from catastrophe’.

The engineer’s account of the accident does not discuss radiological
consequences much, but the other article does. It concentrates on the early
effects and tends to dismiss the later ones, even using an analogy with
aspirin, one tablet of which can cure a headache, while a hundred may kill
you. At this point, the bulletin’s article said, ‘It does not come as a
surprise that hormesis is also discussed ..’

It came as a surprise to me, however, mainly because I had never come
across the word ‘hormesis’ before. Frustratingly, a dictionary of science
and technology leapt from ‘horizontal’ to ‘horn (Acous)’, touching down
on ‘Hormuz, an ancient city on an island at the mouth of the Persian Gulf’
by the same route, perhaps affording me background information for use in
conversation about events in the Middle East, but nothing more. I learned
later, by courtesy of the National Radiological Protection Board, that hormesis
is the name for a theory, dubious though it may appear, that radiation could
repair as well as damage living tissue, depending whether it was below or
above some threshold, as yet undetermined. I can understand the value of
this idea to the author of the article claiming to defend Soviet nuclear
power against the ‘bourgeois propaganda machine’, a phrase which I should
think even in the USSR must be suffering from utter exhaustion.