Ceps Maniac

Yesterday was a sunny, fresh autumn day that had immediately followed a wet day. Those are the ideal conditions for a bit of mushrooming. You can tell when mushroom conditions are perfect: lots of waterlogged cow pats, preferably with a shiny little pool of water on top. This is not where mushrooms are found but watery cowpats are a good omen.

So, with such perfect conditions, the Sous Chef and I decided to go out and see what we could find for our  mushroom risotto. He was particularly keen to find some Penny Bun Boletes (Ceps or Porcini mushrooms) but other boletes would be fine, too. Boletes are not like the mushrooms with ridges or gills underneath their caps, a bolete’s underside looks like a sponge, with lots of pores. We tend to find beech and birch boletes, and slippery jack (another good ‘un), but it’s ceps that are the best.  When it comes to other mushrooms, the gilled sort, we have a few set favourites that we can recognise with confidence but we also took along two books on mushrooms to help with identification on some borderline cases. These gilled types are the ones that contain the deadly-poisonous varieties so while boletes are pretty safe, with the others you have to be sure. Really sure. (some make you feel unwell, others can kill you without warning. Kidney failure). So you have to be sure.

Through the first half of the walk we found lots of interesting but sadly inedible mushrooms and a few poisonous ones, too. We collected some unknown ones to check the sporeprint (place the cap on a sheet of paper, check an hour later what colour spores it drop. This can help narrow it down a bit) but that was just for scientific curiosity, not for eating. It was getting late and still no ceps. The Sous Chef was getting increasingly anxious to find some ceps (“you’re ceps mad, you are”)and eventually we were not disappointed. We found four remarkable specimens and felt extremely pleased with our find. Woodland wildlife likes a penny bun bolete as much as we do, so they often get pretty nibbled but we found some in good condition.

It was some time later we bumped into a group of 6 walkers who had a basket chock FULL of boletes. It put our meagre find into the shade. But hey – we had three large boletes and a small one, enough for our risotto and any more would just be greedy.

A train ride home and a hot bath followed by a creamy wild mushroom risotto, cooked with the day’s find. Delicious! I flippin’ love autumn.

Yesterday’s exam

I’ve spent the past two weeks talking nonsense, about interrogative themes, intersubjectivity and interpretative reportoires. Not to mention the paranoid-schizoid position, the pre-reflexive self and the quoting of opinions of existentialist philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and Heidegger.

This revision has driven the Sous Chef potty, as he tries to seem interested. Later stages saw him test me on concepts, theories, studies but mostly, what I need more than anything to get a decent mark in this course, is the right-sounding waffle. Psychology generally, has been dominated by the scientific, statistically significant, replicable results type psychology but this course has been the voice for the qualitative, touchy-feel, airy-fairy, postmodernistic waffle side of psychology. It’s driven me batty but in the last three weeks it all started to make some sense.

The exam was yesterday morning. One chap was severely reprimanded for bringing his revision notes to the exam desk (admittedly, he was found reading them before the exam had actually started but even so. How desperate and/or stupid is that?)

The exam was three questions in three hours. Each part had a choice of two questions and you chose one from each section. As soon as I read the options, all the information fell out of my head. I went totally blank.

I ate some fruit pastilles to calm myself down and read the questions again. I kept re-reading them and realised I was getting nowhere so just started to scribble some notes for a plan on the first page.

I wrote out three essay plans/brain dumps in the first half hour (I like to get all the info out before I start any proper essay writing) spaced apart to allow essay space between for about three sides of essay and then set to it, 50 minutes for each essay.

The first essay was on unconscious and conscious processes in the formation of subjectivity and started on it. I’d got about half way and checked the time: it had been only 15 minutes! the time was going really slowly, I had plenty of time, so I relaxed and started to enjoy myself.  Yes, I was enjoying the exam!

The second essay was on attitudes  and the last on intra-group processes. I was doing swell until somewhere, midway through the final essay, just as I was starting to critical evaluate the theory of Groupthink (Janis, 1972) that I totally lost the plot. Mid-paragraph I had no idea what I was going to say next, no point to bring out and I was in a dead-end.  One packet of Rolos later and I decided just to change the subject to Phenomenology, drag in some stuff from a chapter on the Fundamental Attribution Error (something about not splitting the world into discrete objects but looking at individual/group identities as a whole rather than separate things) and at 5 minutes before the end, wrote “run out of time“, added some bullet points of good ideas and a quick conclusion that may or may not have had anything to do with the preceding essay.

Ok, so that last essay went rather badly, but I did manage two decentish essays before that. On the strength of my previous exams and assignment, I would need only 55% or better for a 2:1 (a First is sadly out of the question, as I didn’t get a high enough grade average in my assignments – a tutor who declared herself a ‘tough marker’ back in February made me doubt I’d manage a First anyway, so it’s not a big surprise). I won’t hear what my exam result until 18th December, but with a threshold as low as 55%, which I achieved for sure, there’s no need for nailbiting.

Just one more assignment (a biggish one, due 24th November) and my degree will be finished. Hurrah!

Revision and a Robert’s

That TMA I was trying to write, I got a respectable 82% in it. Go me! And now I knuckle down into revision for the exam later this month.

Revision is boring. But also interesting. But mostly it’s  boring. Each evening I get home, I get changed out of my cycling togs, have some food and then drag myself off somewhere quiet, to read up on what the Discursive Psychological perspective has to offer on our understandings of intergroup conflict or similar nonsense. I find myself dropping “interpretative repertoires’ and ‘intersubjectivity’ into conversation with the Sous Chef and so far, he hasn’t tried to quietly murder me for boring the pants off him (yet).

I’ve allocated 14 hours per chapter, with 9 chapters in all. The exam is Tuesday week. Mind you, it’s not been entirely wall-to-wall revision. As an end-of-course gift to me,  I took a day off work to go get myself measured up for a custom-made bicycle frame. It was a little undignified having my inside leg measured (33 inches) and locating the top of my thigh bone required some sharp prods into an extremely well-padded area (yes, my saddlebags are on me, not the bike) and then endless bicycle-speak to ensure I get exactly what I want:  Top tubes, bottom brackets, seat stays, crank lengths – the potential for making a complete tit of myself was pretty high, but I think I managed not to completely sound like an idiot, particularly with the Sous Chef being fluent in bicycle-ese and stepping in whenever my vocabulary failed me.

So, three or so months from now, I shall have my own custom-made bike. The only question now is: what colour should I go for? I’ve provisionally asked for black, but I’m quite taken with burgundy. I could go for a three-tone bike, or one with flashy designs, but I don’t want it looking too desirable (read: worth stealing).

On the train home, The Sous Chef said: “with you getting a Robert’s [frame] like mine, that’s rather like being married”.   – Erm, is it? I thought getting married involved a ring, some vows and a wedding-type event, but I might have that wrong.  If getting married involves buying a £900 bicycle frame and cycling around the world on it, then I guess that explains why fewer people are doing it these days.  I have no idea how his mind has constructed that little logic but it’s quite sweet.

As it is, I’m very excited about my Robert’s frame and hope it’s a new era in a very happy and loving relationship. There’ll be some bumps along the way and we won’t always have a tail wind but hopefully we can have a great ride anyway.