Headstone

Dear Jo,

At long last, I went up to Ecclesall churchyard this morning with the intention of sprucing up your Uncle Ken and Auntie Doris's gravestone. It was a bright, dry day and not too chilly for December 2nd.

I guess that a couple of years have passed by since I last went up to see it and I was pretty shocked with what I saw. What had once been a clear, creamy white headstone was now blackened with fungal growth. I could hardly read the inscription.

In my bag, I had brushes, cloths, kitchen cleaner and two milk containers filled with warm soapy water. I got on with the job but it soon became clear that a lot of the fungal growth would not budge.

There was certainly significant improvement but I was not satisfied.

Back home, I checked out a couple of YouTube videos about cleaning gravestones and realised that I would need some kind of special stone cleaning fluid or spray to complete the job to the best of my ability.

Research led me to the discovery that I could only buy the necessary spray off the shelf at Williamsons in Broomhill. I phoned them to confirm this and I will be heading up to Broomhill on the Number 6 bus tomorrow morning as it is so hard to park a car at Broomhill these days.

By the way, in a strange co-incidence, just as I was about to set off to the graveyard this morning, the postman brought me your Christmas card - all the way from New Zealand! Thank you so much!

I hope that you and Keith are in good health just now and no doubt looking forward to yet another Christmas - perhaps with your family. Please see the two attached "before" and "after" photos but I hope that the next picture I send you will evidence an even bigger transformation.

Ken and Doris were such a sweet old couple and I was privileged to be able to help them as they reached the ends of their lives. As I scrubbed at their headstone this morning, I swear I could hear them singing folk songs beneath the turf.

Kind regards,

Neil

Entangled

Back in September, I found this book in a broken drystone wall up near Redmires reservoirs. It had been placed there by the vlogger, Jack Roscoe whose channel is called "Northern Introvert". Fortunately, I was the first of his followers to get there.

Well, I must admit that a science-based book about fungi  is not the kind of book I would normally pick but because of the delightful circumstances by which I acquired "Entangled Life" by Merlin Sheldrake, I felt almost compelled to read it.

Merlin Sheldrake is an expert mycologist and passionate about his chosen area of study. He attended The University of Cambridge and later undertook his PhD study of underground fungal networks in Panama's tropical forests as a predoctoral research fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. 

He is not some sort of New Age charlatan promoting magic mushrooms. He is fundamentally a respected scientist who has discovered that the more he studies mycylial networks and fruiting fungi, the more he has yet to learn. Mycology is a branch of scientific enquiry that has not been greatly encouraged nor well-funded in our universities. Compared with say botany it is very much a poor cousin.

Honey fungus I spotted in a Lincolnshire churchyard ten years ago.

Just the briefly fruiting tip of an underground mycylial network.

Part of the problem with it is simply that so much of what you need to look at is below ground.

For me as a non-scientist there were sections of "Entangled Life" that I found hard to follow but I stuck with it to gain the reward of insights that I would never have predicted. I felt some of Sheldrake's enthusiasm and awe as well as his intellectual agility.

One of the things that I shall remember about this book is how our planet's plant life is invariably connected with mycylial networking. From grasses to mighty trees there is a powerful interdependent symbiosis happening just below our feet but is little known and by no means fully understood.

"The Guardian" said this when the book first came out:

A “door-opener” book is one with a specialist subject in which it finds pathways leading everywhere. This is a genre devoted to connectedness in all directions, 

and is one well suited to our times. Sheldrake’s book is a very fine example.

While travelling on a train recently, the ticket collector noticed what I was reading and remarked, "That's a bloody brilliant book!" and upon finishing it I  agree with him - even though I admit that I found the reading process hard going. Of the 358 pages in "Entangled Life", no less than a hundred are given over to acknowledgements, notes, an extensive bibliography and a comprehensive index.

Merlin Sheldrake