A couple of weeks ago - the tail end of our October heatwave, was perhaps not the ideal time to go foraging for mushrooms in Epping Forest, but we managed without difficulty to fill up two boxes brim-full. To one who is most used to the perfect white caps of shop-bought varieties, and who is (still) impressed by the fact that a little mushroom is easily capable of killing a man, we seemed to have gathered a right armfull of skull-and-crossbone varieties. But, arriving late back to meet our man - aka Andy "fungi to be with" Overall (I kid you not)- we managed a hasty identification process with his car engine already running. Those few we took home looked dreadful in the kitchen strip-light, and I chickened out after slicing up a little fella that had a colony of bugs inside. Still a bit squeemish, it seems.
