Entangled

Can we trust fungi or are they leaving us without mushroom for manoeuvre?

On a whim I recently bought a book by a man with the unlikely name of Merlin Sheldrake called Entangled Life. Merlin is a mycelial groupie who will literally get down and dirty with his favourite fungi and hang out with them for hours and even days on end. His big thing is that there is all this mysterious life under our very feet that is not only largely unknown to us but actually challenges our assumptions about life, intelligence and cognition. And they once attacked Basingstoke, of which more later.

Fungi don’t conform to expectations. They have their own way of doing things. They grow according to local circumstance rather than to a predetermined model like plants and animals. Imagine being born like everyone else with two arms and legs and a body and a head, but as you grew up into adulthood you grew more arms, more legs, a big bulbous head and an arse the size of Gordon Ramsey’s mouth (if such a thing were possible). By the time you are middle aged you are totally different to everyone else on the planet and may have grown to the size of a football pitch. Fungi do that. They form networks under forest floors and can, unlike Liz Truss and other Tory politicians, create viable strategies and solve problems. In fact there may be a very good case for putting them in charge of the country. They certainly couldn’t make a bigger mess of it than this lot have and we would be spared the constant squabbles and leadership elections.

Fungi are also close mates with lichen and the two species help each other out when it comes to performing certain biological tasks. But the thing that really worries me is that fungi are really aggressive. There are some species who trap and eat insects just like Venus fly traps do in the plant world. They can also infect insects, take over their minds, and force them to do things they wouldn’t normally otherwise do, including ultimately leading them to their own destruction in the name of taking a few mushroom spores to a new breeding ground. This terrifies me. Supposing they got more ambitious and decided to have a crack at humans instead? It would be like invasion of the body snatchers. One minute you are scrubbing mushrooms for breakfast and the next thing you know you are standing naked on the hard shoulder of the M25 with a handful of lichen that you’ve been told to go and fetch.*

There is a whole section of the book devoted, inevitably, to the topic of the mind altering abilities of certain fungi. This might explain where Merlin got his name from as his parents liked to hang out with a very famous Irish mushroom eater and writer called Terence McKenna. Merlin also has a brother called Cosmo who is a whacky musician and the pair of them stand in the middle of dried up lake beds singing mystical songs with a woman who looks like she has been taken over by a bunch of enoki. But I digress. The point is that psilocybin, the active ingredient of magic mushrooms, has been kicking around and influencing humans for a long time. The past masters at getting trippy this way were the ancient south American civilisations who were really into their magic mushrooms, which might explain how easy it was for Cortez and his mates to kill them all, give them nasty diseases, and basically annhialate them.

The mushrooms by the way tried to get their revenge on humanity by attacking Basingstoke. This is a true story. When the small Hampshire town that is now a large concrete nightmare first got paved in the Victoria era, it was not long before the stones started moving and rising up because of the fungus underneath. This account is from a contemporary by the name of Dr Carpenter.

“Some years ago the town of Basingstoke was paved; and not many months afterwards the pavement was observed to exhibit an unevenness which could not readily be accounted for. In a short time after, the mystery was explained, for some of the heaviest stones were completely lifted out of their beds by the growth of large toadstools beneath them. One of the stones measured twenty-two inches by twenty-one, and weighed eighty-three pounds…”

Mushrooms are turning out to be a very fruitful area of research and a source of alternatives to traditional materials in a number of areas. I have a bag made of mushroom leather and fungi are also being used as components in lithium batteries. There is also research taking place into using mushroom for skin grafts. If you were a boring person and had one of these you could at least go to parties and honestly say “I used to be a complete saddo but nowadays I’m much more of a fungi”. It’s a bad joke but a true story. Mushrooms could save the world once we find out more about what is the real nature of what Merlin quite seriously calls the Wood Wide Web. Keep your eyes open and be alert next time you go for a walk in any place where micellial growth may be busy; these guys are worth making friends with. And avoid Basingstoke at all costs. That’s nothing to do with the toadstalls lifting up the pavements. It’s just a really boring place.

* After writing this piece I found out that this was pretty much the story arc behind The Last of Us, the much acclaimed TV series. Damn.