From: nochance@nospam.no   
      
   I always like to say I've been mushroom hunting since before I was born, in   
   that my mother was searching for Girolles the day before my birth. I   
   remember happy days in top secret plantations in a large group of the Polish   
   side of my family searching for Boletus edulis as well. You would find a   
   huge one where the sun had baked the cap deep brown so that it looked like a   
   well fired loaf of bread and announce to all what you had found. Of   
   course these big ones were infested with larvae but it was exciting to be   
   the one to find it.   
      
   Then there was the time when I saw something from my kitchen window white in   
   the distance growing in the grass. My eyesight was already suffering due to   
   myopia but I knew whatever it was required investigation and I persuaded my   
   mother to take me over there. It was a shaggy ink cap!   
      
   And when I found a parrot wax cap growing in the graveyard. It was   
   especially satisfying to identify it all by myself using my "Observer's book   
   of mushrooms and toadstools". A beautiful fungus and still one of my   
   favourites. By the way, for ages I could not understand why Boletus edulis   
   was described as poisonous in that book when myself and family members had   
   been happily eating it for years. Eventually I realised that the text was   
   referring to Boletus satanus and the picture of the cep just happened to be   
   located above the text.   
      
   Once, when we were visiting my gran's grave I could not resist collecting   
   some small fungi growing in the graveyard and hid them in the large middle   
   pocket on the front of my yellow raincoat. I suppose it's quite possible   
   they were liberty caps- which are actually poisonous to children I have read   
   somewhere.   
      
   And some small unidentified white fungi growing on the hill opposite where   
   we stayed. I preserved them in formalin which I bought from the chemist back   
   then and I still have one- although I switched to brine solution many years   
   ago as formalin is carcinogenic. That tube with the mushroom in it has been   
   with me for over 30 years. When I move house it's only official when that   
   mushroom is installed in the new abode!   
      
   Freaking out my best friend with a large Piptoporus betulinus which looked   
   like   
   an alien head was another one. And the time I visited my Aunt and Uncle and   
   they were surprised (and actually quite interested) when they came home and   
   found a large array of mushrooms   
   of all kinds arranged in their living room floor that I had collected from a   
   nearby forest.   
      
   These are all memories from my childhood, it's funny how the memories from   
   then are so vivid and profound even though the actual event may not have   
   been so. I often wonder whether our interests stem from whatever is around   
   us or happening to us when we are children or it is somehow spontaneous from   
   within ourselves.   
      
      
      
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    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)