So I found a pair of conjoined twin mushrooms, sitting among their more regular siblings in a box we purchased recently. Its twin stalks almost reminds one of the horns of Beelzebub and of course it also has disturbing connotations of mushroom clouds..  I wondered idly if this might be taken as a sign of a forthcoming apocalypse, the ‘end of days’ regularly mis-predicted by religious ‘prophets’. Of course if they make the claim often enough, they might get it right eventually.

On its own, fused fungi siblings may seem quite trivial, just a random mutation resulting in a curious single entity. But no, this is the latest in a series of portents that simply cannot be ignored. There was the single red glove, floating ominously in a small pond close to my home, that seemed to be pointing up to the sky. Then there was the tennis ball that mysteriously found its way into our little garden some months ago. The clincher, the thing that seemed to put it all beyond any reasonable doubt, must be the sighting of a strange cloud formation that appeared to be a terrifying dragon about to consume the world, as foretold in the book of Rolf.* Continue reading →