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How it all began …
One Autumn day when I was walking my dog, Griff, in the local woodlands, I came across this spectacular fungi. I hadn’t seen it before and when I tried to find others, I couldn’t. A week later, when I went to find it again, all that was left was the long, slender white stalk and a small amount of, what looked like melted black plastic around the base. It piqued my interest, so I started to investigate what it was … and that’s when I discovered the rare Magpie Inkcap.
As it turned out, the Inkcap family are known for their deliquescing. The Oxford dictionary explain this as:
- [intransitive] to become liquid as a result of decaying (= being destroyed by natural processes)
- [intransitive] (chemistry) to become liquid as a result of taking in water from the air
- Origin: mid 18th cent.: from Latin deliquescere ‘dissolve’, from de- ‘down’ + liquescere ‘become liquid’ (from liquere ‘be liquid’).
So the cap of the Inkcap melts, and it doesn’t take long to do it either.
That may explain why you don’t find many of these around? Anyway, the more I walked through those woods, the more my mind became carried away with imagining a whole new form of magic, based on the Inkcap.
A story began to take seed … and there you have it.
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