I recognise that the recent mini-dramas in my life are self-inflicted.
I was writing an Instagram post late one night recently about the various encounters with nature that day. One of these included a fire-making fungus, which caused me to ask myself: "Actually, where is that thing?" At this point, I was dizzy with fatigue from too many late nights making jam combined with early starts.
That afternoon someone had given me a horseshoe fungus, also known as a tinder bracket to show the boys. This natural material has been used for thousands of years as a portable, smouldering ember to start fire. It was one of the many fascinating things found with 'Otzi' the mummified, four thousand year old man when he was extracted from a glacier on the Italy-Hungary border thirty years ago.
When it was given to me the bracket had been smouldering. I had doused it in water to bring it home. Still, the whole point of the thing, in terms of its use by humans, is that it keeps smouldering.
I literally rushed in the back door through the house and out the front door on my way to an appointment, pushing the now damp fungus at my bemused 12 year old, just back from school. "It smoulders," I said, with no explanation whatsoever. I suppose I hoped this might trigger memories of some other time he might have seen it during an outdoor activity, at perhaps, the Aberfeldy Crannog or during a fire-making workshop we did on Kinnoull hill years ago with Malcolm Handoll of Five Senses. In the evening whirl of shop-cook-clear up-make juice-make jam-walk dog, I promptly forgot all about it, until, at 11.30PM I leapt with surprising vigour from bed to hunt fruitlessly for the damn thing downstairs.
I ran back up sixty stairs and urged the sleeping boy awake:
"Where is that fungus?"
"What?"
"That fungus I gave you. Where is it?"
"The larder."
"What?"
"The larder."
"It's in the larder?
"The food cupboard. Yeah."
Larder's a bit grand for our food cupboard, but, fine.
He closed his eyes and went back to sleep.
It wasn't, unsurprisingly, in the larder. The next day before school I never did ask him why he thought it would be in the larder because I dodged out the house before I could be roped in to driving them to school. Some days you get that vibe. But, unless he was still dreaming, he probably put it in the larder on the basis that "It's one of those things that mum brings back from the countryside and eats". Quite how that ties in with smouldering is unclear. To be fair, it wasn't smouldering at the time I thrust it into his hands.
If you think charging and nervously is an incompatible combination of verb and adverb, I can say with some confidence that with teenage boys it is possible. I therefore charged, nervously into the 14 year old's room. He was still, illegitimately, on his phone but jumped, uncharacteristically, at this unusual invasion.
"That fungus, where is it?"
"What?"
We seem to say this a lot. Perhaps I should work on our gentility.
"Did you see that fungus I gave Henry?"
"Yeah."
"You did? Where is it?"
"In the bin."
"In the bin?
We seem to repeat ourselves too.
"Why?"
"I thought it was a piece of wood."
This was logical, except for the part where he knows I'm talking about something that is not wood, yet believed it to be wood - at least at the time.
I rummaged deep in the bin, extracted the worrisome article, which was not smouldering and put it in my sink where it sat quite innocently, until morning.
