TRY before you buy

The media is great at show­ing us in­ter­est­ing peo­ple we will never meet, fas­ci­nat­ing places we might never visit, or sur­pris­ing ex­pe­ri­ences we would never imag­ine doing. You watch a doc­u­men­tary on scuba div­ing, you like the look of it, and a few years later you have your own div­ing school. Or a mag­a­zine ar­ti­cle you read about ke­to­genic diets, which you’ve never heard of, so you give it a try and be­fore you know it you’ve lost seven kilos and have never felt bet­ter. Or that YouTube chan­nel on car main­te­nance that hap­pens to catch your eye one day, one thing leads to an­other and next minute you’ve got your­self a new and en­gross­ing hobby, ser­vic­ing your own ve­hi­cle and sav­ing a ton of money at the same time.

Yet, it doesn’t al­ways work out that way, and care must be taken be­fore you start or­der­ing ex­pen­sive equip­ment, jet­ting off across the globe, or chang­ing your name to Bhu­vanesh. The media is also great at pre­sent­ing things in an at­trac­tive way, and we all know how easy ex­perts make things look. A 30-minute TV pro­gramme or a four-page ar­ti­cle doesn’t show you the fail­ures and frus­tra­tions, the early-morn­ing rises, or the many hours that went into ac­quir­ing and per­fect­ing that ex­per­tise.

I’m sure we can all think of ex­am­ples of this. Off the top of my head I can sum­mon sev­eral con­cern­ing peo­ple I know well: turn­ing a garage into a mar­tial arts gym after watch­ing a se­ries on muay thai and then dis­cov­er­ing a few classes in that you loathe it; sign­ing up to an on­line hedge witch­ery course on the back of an en­gross­ing TV in­ter­view and then never get­ting past the first class; spend­ing thou­sands on a BMW mo­tor­bike, match­ing BMW hel­mets, and even an of­fi­cial (over­priced) BMW key fob only to find out that rid­ing bikes is un­com­fort­able and sell­ing the lot at a mas­sive loss. All real cases I know of.

I have had my fair share of these ex­pe­ri­ences, and a few lucky es­capes. One of them was mush­room hunt­ing (the sea­son is un­der­way, as you can read about on pages 48 and 49). Going into the woods armed with a stick and a bas­ket for­ag­ing for wild mush­rooms is big in Cat­alo­nia, and every year (as we do this month) ar­ti­cles and pro­grammes on the pas­time ap­pear all over the local media. Mush­room hunt­ing has plenty going for it: out­doors, fresh air and ex­er­cise, plenty of fas­ci­nat­ing knowl­edge and learn­ing to be had, a sense of sat­is­fac­tion when you make a find, a catch to proudly bring home and share with the fam­ily, pic­nics, pleas­ant so­cial in­ter­ac­tion… the list goes on.

I too was se­duced by the glossy mag­a­zine ar­ti­cles and highly-pro­duced TV re­ports and be­came con­vinced that for­ag­ing for wild mush­rooms was up my alley. For­tu­nately, my neigh­bour is big into hunt­ing mush­rooms and every year re­turns from ex­cur­sions with his bas­kets burst­ing. It’s not un­usual to see him sit­ting at a table in his garage with a cou­ple of friends, chat­ting and sip­ping rough red wine, while they sort, clean and share out their catch. I want in, I thought, and he agreed to take me along next time he went for­ag­ing.

A lack of space means I have to leave out the grisly de­tails of that day, but let me just say I re­turned home bedrag­gled and soaked to the skin, cov­ered in scratches, tired and hun­gry (al­though not in a good way), with my back aching and my head spin­ning, as after hours of pa­tient in­struc­tion I was still in­ca­pable of telling any two mush­rooms apart, which is vital if you don’t want to end up in hos­pi­tal. What’s more, my hours of for­ag­ing had pro­duced three unim­pres­sive rov­el­lons, two of which I later saw had worms in them.

My neigh­bour gen­er­ously of­fered to take me with him the fol­low­ing week but, as gra­ciously as I could, I de­clined. The les­son I learnt was not that mush­room hunt­ing is not all it’s cracked up to be, but to try be­fore you buy.