Comment: good numbers on the Me, Too piece.  But few comments.  That tells you something.  It’s a hot topic?  No one but a few agree?  No disagreements?  No one willing to comment?  I will now move on.  I sort of feel an obligation to ‘state my opinion’ (it’s an integrity issue – I have to speak up when I think I have to speak up) and, God knows, I have been known to repeat myself from time to time but, clearly this is a topic no one wants.  So, the following is just a bit of OTG.

First..with the mushrooms.  Last December Sal dragged me shopping.  I was wandering semi-brain dead amongst the crap that passes for ‘stuff’ at Xmas and found myself looking at a discount bin at Capital Iron in Victoria.  In the bin for 50% off was a bag of rotten goo.  Literally a bag that was starting to ooze mold and stuff.

How could I resist?

It was a mushroom-farm-starter kit that was ‘too-keen’ to get started and so heavily discounted lest the other merchandise sprout up with edibles.  I bought it and, of course, asked it to wait until I got back from SE Asia.  It did.  The growth rate halted.  Until yesterday, anyway, when I released the fungi into a growing medium and placed it all in a dark but damp and warm environment.  Let the shrooms begin!  We’ll see.  It is the first thing garden-wise I have tried to grow.  I will build garden boxes and haul dirt and collect seaweed but BEING an actual gardener is hard for me.  I get too attached to my sprouts, too close to my shallots.  I can’t rip the tops off of carrots.

Mushrooms are different.  I am rather indifferent to them.  Meh to mushrooms.

Don’t get me wrong.  I like to eat ’em but there is little in the way of a ‘bonding’ like there is with say, tomatoes or even flowers.  Mushrooms can be addressed without anything compassionate getting involved.  To be fair, I am pretty dispassionate about lettuce, too, but this is NOT a confessional.

Sal and I are in the latest reading of the book and, although almost being ready to send it out to beta readers, we are still finding mistakes and altering structure.  This book clearly ain’t done yet.  So, he we are on a remote hunk o’ granite on a remote island in March.  Alone.  Writing.  Minding our own business . . .

. . . until . . . a local guy drops in  to welcome us home with a few prawns.  As we greet one another, a gaggle of children pop into view.  Unaccompanied.  There are five of them ranging in age from almost three to twelve.  Two older boys and three little girls.  They are all relatives (cousins and such) and I know them.  They call me by name.  I greet them by name.  They scramble up from the beach one hundred feet below without benefit of a trail and simply monkey up the relatively impassable cliff-side, stopping now and then to help the 3-year old who was indicating second thoughts by the half-way point.   After a minute of kibitzing, they head off to their own place on the other side of the peninsula with Grandpa.

Great to see kids being kids in the old fashioned way.

So, prawn-friend and I head over to my place for tea and, before we get there, two middle-aged women (one with a cane) hobble into view from another direction emerging from the forest and greeting us warmly.  I know them, too.  Part of the Grandpa neighbourly crowd.  We chat about diesel engines and the older one having been a biker chick for a portion of her life, and they leave all enthused about the mushrooms I may be getting sometime in the future.

Prawner and I finally get home and Sal makes us tea and a sandwich just in time to be interrupted by a man and his just-proposed-to-betrothed who come out of the other side of the forest just to say ‘Hi.’  We hug and congratulate and chat for a bit…….they head off to drink champagne.

“So, prawn-man, you thought we lived remote, didn’t you?”

“Not anymore.  We just encountered NINE people literally emerging from the bush!  That’s weird man.”

“Well, that was nine for you.  But ten for me.  You, too, came out of the blue and just appeared.  This is a crazy place, prawn-man. Hard to get enough peace and quiet to write a book, ya know?”