Well on Wednesday I finally got time to clean the russula fungi and stew them. It took a while because the pine needles were well stuck onto the top, and because I had to take a tiny nibble of each one. Any hot ones had to be dicarded. And we finally ate them last night, with cream and pasta. They were delicious. And we’re all still alive.
Poor little Inky
We have two cats, Bib and Inky. Both are black, but Bib, the mother, has a white bib under her chin. Last week Inky came home with her face all swollen. I only just had time to get her to the vet before they shut at 8pm, so the vet said to leave her overnight. It was an abscess almost as big as a golf ball and she’d need a…
Toadstools
One of my friends goes hunting wild mushrooms every Sunday, and today I went with her. We were in a group of about twenty people, all spread out over the hillside in the pine forest. I was hoping to find nacidas – the only wild fungus I can reliably recognise on the island, because they look like little new potatoes poking out of the ground. Well I did find nacidas….
Making an Exhibition of Myself
I’ve got an exhibition of photos up at the local airport, so life’s a bit strange at the moment. We start the day with a mad rush to get my son to school, then I go straight to the airport and open the exhibition. For most of the morning there are just enough people coming through that I can’t settle to anything else, so I get thoroughly bored. Once or…
Osama bin Laden and the Paris Hilton
We’re on holiday. We just spent five days in Paris. Guess when we were supposed to be flying to London? When we left the hotel at 11am, the receptionist checked the web and said there was a problem at Heathrow, but it looked like London Luton wasn’t affected. So we took a taxi to the airport and checked in, they said we’d have a two hour delay because somebody had…
Dr Slither
One way and another I haven’t written much lately, so I was relieved when my story “Slugs” went down well at the critters writing group. I edited, it, changed the title to “Dr. Slither”, and sent it off to Farthing magazine. Now I average one sale for every ten submissions, so I was stunned and delighted when they bought it after only 12 days. The only catch is that it…