Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
lid on it, especially when they are encouraged so much by their mother, was proving quite
difficult.
Their love of animals is a by-product of the outdoor life that we were leading, but even they
have their 'outdoor' limits. Nothing could persuade them to join Natalie and me in foraging
for and eating wild mushrooms, and you can't really blame them for that. I wasn't all that
enthusiastic either. There are mushrooms everywhere in the autumn, and while we were out
on a bike ride one day we found a whole pathway of them in a little copse. Natalie wanted
to pick them there and then, but Samuel and I, both naturally suspicious people, weren't con-
vinced, as we know less about wild
champignons
than we do about chinchillas. We decided
to be cautious and consult our topic of French mushrooms when we got home.
Our particular topic of French mushrooms, however, is one of the world's most useless
guides, up there with
Fell Walking for the Agoraphobic
or
A Politician's Guide to Probity
.
It's a thick book and 'details' hundreds of mushrooms and fungi, carefully separating the pois-
onous from the edible with each entry supported by a picture. The problem is that the pictures
are all drawings and they are all exactly the same! Whether they couldn't afford a photograph-
er and the illustrator only knew how to do one kind of mushroom I don't know, but it only
serves to muddy the waters of the business frankly. This singular drawing, which (don't get
me wrong) is very good, was seemingly of the exact mushroom we had found, so now we
couldn't tell if it was poisonous, edible or just one of the charmingly entitled 'Mild Irritants'
(making it sound like some mushrooms may try to sell you double glazing over the phone
during dinner).
It's always best to consult experts in these situations, however, Natalie became convinced
that the mushrooms were edible because Sandrine, the hairdresser, told her they would be.
Firstly, I remonstrated, she's a hairdresser - she will say anything! And secondly, she's a
French hairdresser - she'll say anything and wave scissors in your face if you disagree. At the
time it was me having my haircut, and I'd rather she'd have concentrated on my latesixties
Steve Marriot haircut than convince Natalie to risk poisoning her family.
We picked the mushrooms on the way back from town (that's how convincing French
hairdressers are), but I was still uneasy about the whole thing.
'Are you sure we should do this?' I asked, as if it was illegal or something.
'Well, Sandrine said it would be fine,' Natalie answered, though I could tell she was waver-
ing.
'But she's French!' I tried one final time. 'They eat anything.'
'Oh, stop it!' The fifty per cent French blood in Natalie started bubbling to the surface like
lava as she picked a couple of hub-cap-sized mushrooms. 'What's the worst that can happen?'
'Oh, I dunno, death?'
I cleaned the mushrooms with a damp cloth, having read somewhere that you should never
wash mushrooms because you lose the flavour (or in this case maybe poison), covered them
