The TV was playing. 

When I came down for my morning green tea, I found Jake watching the film Maureen had chosen and put out for him.  (Hadley said he usually watched something for half an hour in the morning).

Alfred Molina, all in black, with a handlebar moustache and a harsh British accent, unmistakably the bad guy, was evicting a mother and her numerous small children out into the street. “Off you go and take your little munchkins with you”, he rasped. This was Snidely Whiplash, who had robbed a bank and sprinkled gold along a nearby river to create a gold rush to Semi-Happy Valley, the town he now controlled by terrorising the mayor, changing its name to Whiplash City.

Jake laughed at the horse that blew raspberries and farted, and loved the motorcycle chases.   

Horse, that was his name, is the beloved companion of dumbo Dudley Do-Right, Canadian Mountie, who, with the help of a down-and-out prospector (Eric Idle), will, of course, eventually defeat Snidely and give Semi-Happy Valley back to its grateful people. (Dudley will never learn not to step on the nearest loose plank though).

And of course he will win back Nell Fenwick (Sarah Jessica Parker), his childhood friend, who had gone away to “learn about the world” — which included a Phd from Harvard and a spell as US ambassador to Guam.

Maureen came down and Jake said: “Can we watch it to the end?” She saw I was enjoying it too and laughed. “I guess I am outnumbered”, she said.

Irony and joyful dance routines for adults, slapstick for the kids.  But when I checked it out on Rotten Tomatoes, I found it had been a huge flop.

Maureen must have watched it with Amanda. A good choice.

We had a plan for the morning. After breakfast we would go and look for fungi in the woods around the old Norman castle. I would take pictures and then we would try to identify them when we got home.

It was a bitterly cold day. 

This place is a called a “castle” but there is nothing there now.  From the summit there are panoramic views to the north and and west. 

We were not very successful, probably because of too much logging,  but we did find the the fungus that sticks out like a plate from the trunks of trees, brown, leathery and hard to break off. This, it turns out, is the bracket fungus.  In China and Japan it is used in cooking.  The Japanese name for the bracket fungus means “monkey’s bench”. Jake liked that.

That’s what we learned from Wikipedia.

All fungi are the fruiting bodies of a mycelium, a dense network of filaments that spreads from the fungal spore. I read somewhere that fungi like the bracket fungus might have killed off the great primeval forests that have made our coal supplies. 

But most mycelia make a positive contribution, breaking down organic matter and refreshing the soil as in a compost heap. I like thinking of this mat of fibre just under the surface of our lives and the fruits that pop up in a warm, wet moment.

Over lunch we had a debate about percentages. If an increase of 100% is equivalent to multiplying something by 2, what is a 6000% increase?  I thought, if 6000 is 60 times 100, then that should be the same as multiplying by 120. So starting with the figure 5, a 6000% increase would be 600.

Maureen said that didn’t feel right. I agreed.

Numbers were on our minds. The quote for fixing the car I damaged by reversing into a wall was £750. All I had done is cracked a fibreglass panel. We decided not to repair it.

Hadley will be down for the weekend.