When I published a short post about fungi last month, a friend suggested I should read a book called Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds and Shape our Futures, by a chap called Merlin Sheldrake . So I did. Thanks! Merlin Sheldrake is an English mycologist - a person a who studies fungi - with a PhD from Cambridge University which he earned studying fungi in the rain forests of Panama. He is like the opposite end of the pole from me. I know barely anything about fungi, he is a fungal tragic. He studies fungi for a living and in his spare time he does fungus-related things for fun. In researching this book he brewed wines and beers from all sorts of organic matter using the yeast already present on their skin and in the air (yes, yeast is a fungus). He took LSD, an artificial hallucinogen modelled on hallucinogenic mushroom compounds, as part of a scientific experiment. He immersed himself in a fermentation bath, a bath of warm compost which is said to
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson