what’s on your mind? I asked. After some thought It’s just… What is it I asked putting my hand on his shoulder… It’s just…When is the end? Not yet I explained and I don’t know when but not now. We talked about wheelchairs and stairlifts and all the other (in)conveniences that were better than the […]
Author archives: pasdelasbas
Love you He didn’t say Which made no sense When he knew he might But such risks jeopardise meaning So better knots in the belly They last longer Innards of time
Of mushrooms and maggots
Which is the finest wild food? This changes with the season but one mushroom—the cep, the porcini, known in English as the Penny Bun—has risen from the forest floor to stake its claim. I’ve been dreading writing this: the story of the king mushroom. The problem with ceps is that they decay very quickly. When […]
The Myth of the Nettle
What is it that holds us to the earth? Sensing gravity, giving it meaning. How do we grow roots in a place when we don’t quite recognise the smell of the soil? Angga came to the UK in 1997 as a child, a minor, with his sister, two brothers and parents, his father a doctoral […]
The Elusive Pignut
Seeking a small, chickpea-sized tuber above Bradfield. As I walk through fields and woods in the valleys above Bradfield with a group of friends, I stop various people innocently walking and ask them what sort of wild foods they collect, if any. The responses are what I might expect: blackberries, wild garlic in the spring, […]
Illicit knowledge, imagination and nature’s bounty
Collecting wild foods draws us into a landscape from which we map the foods we eat. Food pornography generally indexes its lustful or gluttonous representation. For me, it refers more precisely to psilocybin mushrooms. Scouring the fields surrounding my mother’s village in Wales in the late 1970s, I carried with me an already-tattered first edition […]
yet to come (to Melee)
It’s a pretty rotten little apple I catch I eat it right down to the core where the flesh is softer where the fresh is flesher And there with the fresh flesh I flesh out this idea that somehow and somewhere you’re not alive at all and you’re not dead either you can’t really die […]
You are right
So where do I start with something that’s perhaps already too late. I remember sitting talking with Ben Graves probably a month ago now if not more. He told me how in China the virus was being presented as the enemy. China and its people were at war. I took that as some sort of […]
for Ben
Jesus of Immingham
Andrews Church, Immingham. To you, I don’t know your name. I’m sure I could find out, you were doing the flower arrangement for the church on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the departure of Immingham’s Mayflower passengers, thier Founding Fathers. It is Friday, 29 November 2019 and I’ve travelled down with Steve Pool, […]