I
n early summer, after the first rains, Mum used to take us out to look for mushrooms.
Us being my brother Tim and Bessie our bull terrier nanny. We used to go to the Mbabane Oval, which was a grass expanse in front of the Club. Sometimes we were looking for the foot of the rainbow to find the pot of gold… but found mushrooms instead.
All mushrooms are not the same, she taught us. The best ones are the small white mushrooms with pink-brown gills. As they grow older, their bonnets open and the gills go dark brown. Mushrooms in sauce on toast … my mouth waters even now!
But, there is a dangerous mushroom that usually grows under trees, which looks similar but has white gills. Beware, that one is deadly poisonous. So are 
the 
pink ones with white spots and the long tall ones and most of the little forest fungi.
In those days, mushrooms were mushrooms; we hadn’t heard of fancy ones like shiitake, fonterels, chanterelles and morels. I guess they would have seriously confused our clear identification of dangerous ones!
We were quite taken aback when our big brother, who was a tree enumerator (before he was a policeman), arrived back from the forests with a sackful of the ugliest toadstools one can imagine.
The Swazi name for them was makowe. With great trepidation we tried some, after we had seen him eat two plates full and not die. De-wonderfully-luscious!!
However, that really messed up our simple means of identifying edible fodder: some look like the common and garden button mushrooms but are dangerous, some look like huge frog-kin but are delicious!
I suppose that is how we should treat people. Just because they are
different, doesn’t mean they are poisonous and some that look the same are very poisonous!
Find out before you trust a mushroom and beware of strange ones!
Angst is a type of anxiety that arises in response to nothing in particular, or the sense of nothingness itself. It’s not exactly fear and not the same as worry, but a simple fac
t of the human condition, a feeling that disrupts peace and contentment for no definable reason.
s defined as a feeling of weariness and dissatisfaction with connotations of self-indulgent posturing and European decadence. Just a bit frilly for me, like a lace handkerchief splashed with cologne, pressed to the brow.
chmerz describes a world weariness felt from a perceived mismatch between the ideal image of how the world should be with how it really is. Just a bit too saintly and clear cut for me.
begin again.
There are some very wild cards now in play in global politics. They are not who might be called gentlemen. I would call them loose 
cannons, who have abundant egos, few scruples and Messianistic delusions.
Then there are the others who are really nihilists and anarchists who have been fighting the world for some time.
right. Circle those wagons, don’t let any strangers near…
My deafness began 35 odd years ago when I parted my hair with a rifle bullet. Not deliberately of course, but carelessly, following the dictates of my empty belly and breakfast waiting on the table.
In about 2002, my children and wife’s complaints sent me to an audiologist and a set of hearing aids, which I used desultorily. They rusted up and were useless by 2010.
sounds are piercingly sharp, while others remain indistinct. One of my children and two of my daughters’ partners mumble, another lisps, my wife and the other two children are soft spoken.
Two metres away from me a pink and grey galah has swooped onto the hanging basket which serves as a seed feed for our avian visitors. The first visitor of the day there is usually the beautiful 
Indian blue ring-necked parakeet, obviously an exotic escapee, who stridently whistles at us to replenish the dish with sunflower seeds.
coloured rainbow lorikeets who perch in the nearby cabbage tree like Christmas decorations shrieking and murmuring. They are tough characters: I saw one back down a magpie on our lawn, hop-charging it until it moved on. They have just chased off the galah which is a much bigger bird too!
ce or remarriage or death.
Recently I have been engrossed by this Inquiry into values by Robert Pirsig. It was a classic of the new free thinking era of the 70’s; however I avoided reading it (and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). I suppose I felt they were a wee bit kitsch.
d a great deal of support for my thoughts on spiritual direction, differences between sexes, xenophobia and beauty.
sillysocksonfriday 