har-ish

I first encountered fungi on the rotting wooden thresholds around our home. They probably weren’t mushrooms, more like their rather emaciated cousins, but I was fascinated by them. They would appear in little colonies, sometimes on mounds of damp mud around our outhouse, seemingly materialising overnight.

I wasn’t allowed anywhere near them. My father, who was a zoology professor, had made it very clear that some fungi could be poisonous and others could leave me with a rather unpleasant introduction to lung infections. So I admired them from a safe distance.

Years later, during my undergraduate studies, I discovered that the study of fungi was called mycology. Giving my childhood curiosity a name somehow made it even more interesting.

Then came my fascination with bioluminescent mushrooms. I tried various ways of growing them myself and failed spectacularly. The failures haven’t quite killed the ambition. I still dream of having a colony of them in my backyard someday.

Just imagine it. Glowing mushrooms in the darkness, with fireflies dancing around them. An absolute fairyland.

There is, of course, another rather unexpected chapter to my mushroom fascination. Much later, a friend and I tried magic mushrooms and went on a rather different kind of “trip”. For a few hours, the world acquired some of the strange, dreamlike qualities I had always imagined around mushrooms.

In a funny way, I suppose I finally visited the fairyland I had imagined as a child.

But I still want the original version. Bioluminescent mushrooms, fireflies and a backyard. No passport required.

So this became my Mycologist’s Mappa Mundi, a colony of improbable little organisms mapped from memory, curiosity and a lifelong fascination with the wonderfully strange kingdom of fungi.