charles barrow's writing

Autumn seems to have arrived very suddenly, seemingly all at once in the last few days. The wind and the heavy rains are dragging leaves off the trees and heaping them into soggy piles on the pathways, making a trip to the local shops a slippery and treacherous affair. And a lot of fungi, enjoying the damp and still relatively warm air, are sprouting in the verges around tree stumps, and giving off the earthy scent of decay. Indoors, I'm dusting off fat church candles, to help light the dark corners of the room at night, and shaking out the thick sofa throws I'll use for extra warmth and to draft-proof myself on the sofa in the evenings. I've already made my first pot of minestrone soup of the season, and will be swapping out my summer salads for bowls of macaroni cheese, and veg chilli in the coming days.  At the end of the week, at 2am on Sunday, the clocks will go back one hour, and the nights will draw in alarmingly quickly, and daylight will be all but done by 5.30pm. ...

I was looking for an excuse to post this photo. How could I post it and make it seem relevant to anything? November. It's the first day of November, it's grey, dreary and very wet outside. A day to hurry down the street, ignoring everything around you in a rush to get home. Autumn is often like this, but it can be warm and sunny and if you slow down and look around then you might spot a mushroom village like this one. Writing. A few posts ago I wrote about Agatha Christie's penchant for poisoning her fictional victims. I was talking about digitalis, in particular, that time but now I'm wondering if the Queen of Murder (a new nickname that probably won't catch on), if Christie ever used mushrooms to kill off a rich old relative and prompt Miss Marple to get snooping.* Sure, some fungi are delicious in a risotto (with parmesan) but others cause the most hideous, lingering deaths. I'm certain she would have known which was which. I've no idea what kind of...