Are newspapers made of iron?

[todayiamadaisy]

Autumn, season of mushrooms. Growing up on a farm, that meant every few days, I would be sent out with a bucket and a little knife to collect them. Little me and my two dogs and quite often Great King Louis the cat, traipsing the fields and bringing home the harvest. Flat brown mushrooms and little round pink ones for the bucket, and funny white puffballs that weren't for eating but which emitted a puff of yellow spores when stabbed.

Our paddocks were flat, green and flat and filled with sheep, but when the rain set in some of the sodden ground would sink, leaving solid little fairy hills like stepping stones. Swathes of field would fill with water; deepest in the far swamp paddock, which had wild ducks on it each year, but even the home paddocks had ankle-deep lakes, which I and the dogs would walk around while Louis waded through them like a silver-grey tiger. The dogs were interested in the mushroom-cutting business, crowding round me in case it was something for them, but Louis would stalk off to the boxthorn hedge on the field border to see if there were any rabbits to be found. Unsuccessful, he would come back and mew to be carried home.

No fields in the suburbs, so these days I buy boxes to grow my mushrooms in. My portobello box arrived this week and already there are a handful of tiny white fists pushing their way through the peat.

I skived off knitting for most of this week and managed only two rows, so no cowl photo today. Instead, a bit of local colour. Four doors away from me, the worst house on the street, an old building that hasn't had anyone in it for years, is being knocked down. First they took the windows out; then they took the roof off; then they removed the interior and exterior walls of the top floor, leaving just one fitting visible:



When I stopped to take that photo, a woman came out of the house opposite and called across the street to me: "I have a great view of it from my kitchen sink!" And then she went back inside.