We saw you yesterday Ellesmere Green Crossing the road Holding dirty blue jogging slacks up with one hand Grey brown jacket too hot for the weather and Looking not at us but where we could not see
Then today on Minna Road It’s like you’ve taken only one step Across the night Through morning To midday Hand holding slacks Jacket too warm Eyes inverted unfurling tomorrow
This your paean for the virtue of true timelessness
Driving down the A61 from Sheffield to Chesterfield I turn off Elgar’s Nimrod and I pull into a layby. I leave the car and with the dog on the lead I find a gap in the hedge and descend through an archaeology of cannabis, strata of clay pebbles and plastic bags. Generations of it now.
Generations of generations. Generations formed in it, generations fucked on it, fucking on it. Generations dying in it, generations living it, regretting it, loving it and leaving it. And here it is, a mess on the ground.
I cross the stream and climb the hill, such noise and clatter I can’t even bear to restart Elgar, the most pastoral. Even my mind won’t combat and embrace utter noise, the anti-pastoral.
The dog jumps and we land on a forestry track so deeply rutted further up I can barely walk.
Such a young track this, most pastoral of all, a labour in the forest and on it young plants are forming, hollies, chestnut, oak and I have to leave behind solipsism in order to accept that I’m actually doing anything.
Further away from the noise now on the hillside, I’ve seen the map and I know the path is higher and I’ll reach something fit for feet.
Yellow Pimpernel, Climbing Corydalis and Figwort announce the limit of the road noise and with the sound of birdsong I start at the holly and arrive at a Holly Hagg, a proper deep Hollins.
The densest I’ve ever seen. Look at that, the size of oaks.
Not crossing the road over the A61, but leaving Monks Wood and heading up the hill to Black Piece. Below Bull Close farm and Ouzel Bank cottage, I see from the map at Black Piece there is a stream running in a gully.
So I’m doing this, this nothing, this stopping in the car on the way to the market to walk my dog. I’m doing this with some inclination, with some force because.
I’ve only got one chance to do this and it’s now and it’s today and if I don’t it will be gone and I’ll be left alone with nothing.
Nothing at all.
And I need this to be alive.
So now with the road a murmur like a voice you hear and know it’s people from your village cutting wood; a bird you don’t recognise flying into the upper branches of young oak, buttercups amongst the long grass and a single Bluebell you recognise as Spanish.
Now let’s turn on Elgar.
Here where the Balsam has taken root and cleavers grow in the grass. As if the names were magic and your voice anything other than an idiot’s,
A fool’s voice,
A dunce’s voice
just a liar maybe
who loves Stitchwort
and your dog going mad
So I’m doing it for a reason
and the reason is
because
I must
when I lie there
staring at the ceiling
it’s this that will
balance
out
what’s
coming
Because it won’t leave regret
and that’s the one thing we all must avoid
And first it’s some stupid vetches and then you start on the track to switch on Elgar but you can’t get anywhere.
Such a great bloated world hits you, the great bloated world of the forest dwellers just keeps pulling you in.
Again and again and again.
Unbelievable badger diggings.
Now try Elgar again and the dog shits in the woods and I notice it’s next to a badger latrine and I think of my astounding love of the sight of the sett and the badger’s love of getting home to that dug black earth.
As Elgar builds, this mundane little path now, at the top of the woods, some smells here and there, something to come, something’s been, something underground, nothing wrong, and as it builds its the brain that builds and ideas come and you think:
I should let them go…
Like some mindfulness practice…
But of course you’re always trying to remember, and you wish you had a notepad and you could write down the reminder to yourself, to tell someone that they should train the dog…
Your reminder to yourself about something you can’t even remember now because you’ve remembered it 1000 times and still you forget, still you try to remember, still you think about whether you should forget, whether you should remember…
And the point of it all? Is just to do it rather than not. To acknowledge it rather than not because it’s the only thing you do.
So we reach a fence with private land beyond that borders the path and a man who has lost his phone earlier while walking his dog is tracking it to retrieve it riding his son’s bike.
I am reading tea leaves.
Remember to track yourself, don’t be ashamed of your tracking device, just don’t lose it, if you do go back and find it, there’s nothing wrong with it.
So this is just a tracking device, this is today, a tracking device, I’m tracking myself.
And besides me lies a fence because somebody doesn’t trust me.
Doesn’t trust. Someone wants privacy.
And you can understand why because there is nothing wrong with privacy.
Except that it invites.
So you reach the Dell, the glade, the water. Black Piece is there now, the marsh, with bulrushes and you keep away from the private property sign, way above it now, my goodness, like you thought you would, you’re above something and there you are, well above it.
Well next time you’ll come won’t you?
But the man can’t find his phone there is not enough data on his daughter’s phone to locate it.
So not everything will tell you something and a lot of the time you can’t be bothered, just like you actually said you’ll come back, to go into that underbelly, that marsh.
It’s an underbelly that doesn’t go anywhere except down into the ground. That’s where you’ll go back to. You’ll end up coming back here, won’t you? When you die.
Down at the deep little marsh, stuck there, smelling like that, clay under your feet, nobody can go there with you unless they want to sink as well, or they can watch from the edge.
You can hide there, like Alfred, waiting for a kingdom.
And you get rewarded as if that were possible by the broadleaf Helleborine.
As you near the road, thrown back to those voices you recognise, the most confusing of all, the loudest one, the one you recognise and you know exactly how dull it is, how dangerous it is. But you also know how to avoid it until you can’t. And then it’s something you know you have to hide from. So it’s safe and you like walking on these little side paths down back on the woodsman’s tail, the woodsman’s trail. The great ruts of the logger’s track.
And that’s your journey isn’t it?
You haven’t quite finished the Elgar, you’ve got that last quiet section because the badger shat and interrupted your crescendo and you made your own one because you found your bearings.
There, you remember now?
You’re tracking yourself but you didn’t find it, but you tracked yourself tracking yourself like some stupid philosopher.
So there you are making your way northbound on the southbound carriageway and you find a colombine in the grass and you can barely hear your own thoughts. But you can actually – you can hear all your own thoughts regardless of what noise is going on. You can always hear your own thoughts, even without thinking.
You see your car in the distance and this last stretch of flowers and grasses bordering the woodland on the road.
You ended on ferns and now passing some silver fish, I don’t know what they are but I’ll call them silverfish.
I’ve been dreading writing this: the story of the king mushroom.
The problem with ceps is that they decay very quickly. When small they retain their form longer, but the larger specimens, when the spongy under-flesh has already matured to yellow or green, will putrefy if left too long. You can keep them in the fridge for a few days, where they may exude small white maggots overnight.
Keep them in the fridge with the caps uppermost on a plate. That way you can remove the maggots.
The old meaning of the word ‘maggot’ comes from the notion of a maggot in the brain, hence ‘maggotry’ as folly or absurdity; the maggot itself is a whim, a fancy, a crotchet. And that’s exactly what the cep does—it worms its way into your thinking.
Ceps are wild until you get to know them, then they become familiar. The sheen of skin on their caps is tanned like a beechwood cutting board. They are highly seasonal but somewhat irregular in their appearance. When a wood blooms with ceps there is nothing quite like it.
No doubt one among many, I have fallen to my knees with more than just the careful action of a paring knife on my mind. In and around Sheffield, the late summer and early autumn provide the better opportunities for finding ceps, although this year there was a good mid-summer harvest. They are stately, statuesque fungi with no gills but innumerable tiny tubes, vertically clustered under the upper flesh of a cap that glistens after rain.
They come eight days after the rain…
Unless you have a penchant for formal mycology, by far the best way to learn about this mushroom and consume it safely is to forage in the company of an experienced collector.
The collectors vary. The most annoying is ‘someone’. Particularly someone who has gotten to the ceps before you. Someone is most frustrating, particularly when you know them…
Those of us who love carefully slithering the earth from the foot of the cep hate the clean, horizontally-sliced stems of the professional collector. We are jealous of their 10 or 15 or 20 sites, gathered over time, each one in season, neatly successive.
Always pick a cep when you find one. They never grow again.
There’s money in them there hills. Selling ceps can be a profitable business if—and it’s a big ‘if’—you have a market. Where I learned to collect, in the Dordogne, France there was a wholesaler on the western edge of Les Eyzies who bought ceps by the kilo and transformed them into conserves.
It was near there that I first leapt from a car and gathered some indistinct boletus, hoping to have my first haul. These turned out to be the magical—in the Tommy Cooper sense of the word—Rubroboletussatanas. Their lurid red and promisingly putrescent flesh should have warned me. It took a visit to the chemist in my village, where they pronounced, with appropriate seriousness and through (I now realise) suppressed laughter, the mushroom’s name: le bolet de satan.
You know they are up when you see the cars parked everywhere.
It was with unrivalled joy that I first found ceps around Sheffield. I’d lived here for about four years and was walking in woodland looking at tree carvings. There were many soldiers’ initials carved nearby along a row of beech trees, past which WWI recruits or conscripts must have walked.
The footpaths are good. You get that little bit more light.
An older man in his late 60s was walking slowly under the trees, prodding the turf with a stick. What was he looking for? “Mushrooms.”
I watched the tip of his stick in the grass. As he pushed aside a tuft, there appeared a tiny button cep. He bent down to pick it up and put it in his bag with many others. I followed him for some time.
“I’m not English. I’ve been here a long time and I love coming to collect these mushrooms. I’ve got more time now. I only pick them when they are really small like this. That’s when they’re best.”
Wild as they can only be, and with no practical means of commercial production, it’s their value that domesticates them—and, of course, their consumption. Extraordinarily anthropomorphising in their effect, they reverse our journey to the soil, yet so soon they return.
When you get a snowy winter…
For those of you who know this already, a cep wood is some sight. When silent, it glitters with ‘next time’.
I cooked mine with charcoal burners and scotch bonnets.
