October

Appears in

Published 2018

About

Around the beginning of October, Greg appears. Greg is a proper Whole Earth Catalog sort of organic farmer, a refugee from Haight Ashbury who has nestled down with a very small organic farm in the Chilterns. He produces squash and Hopi corn and usually dumps a sack of the stuff in the kitchen when you’re not looking and then shoves in a big bill. The quality is great so you don’t mind.

In 1987, when we opened Kensington Place, two guys used to turn up at the back door with wild mushrooms that they had picked themselves. They knew who to go to when they had a couple of giant puffballs, some saffron milk caps and the first ceps of the season. One of them, Michael de Stromillo, is still buying and selling mushrooms. It was he who provided the extraordinary honey fungus that obscures my countenance in the frontispiece at the beginning of this book.