If you go down to the woods today, youd better go with a guide. Especially if todays the day you decide to start picking, cooking and eating your own mushrooms. Because although only a dozen or so of the 4000 odd varieties of mushroom and toadstool littering Britains autumnal forest floors are properly poisonous, that malevolent fistful of fungi have, to a man, spitefully elected to perfectly mimic only the very tastiest specimens on offer.
Indeed, its not unusual to hear of entire families who have been wiped out by home-cooking containing the fruits of a less than fickle forage through the undergrowth and only an expert can readily differentiate between that which will take your breath away in a purely culinary sense and that which will remove it on a somewhat more permanent basis.
Step forward then, Paul Burns, head chef of the Airds Hotel in Port Appin on the majestic Argyllshire coast of Western Scotland. Voted Scotlands Hotel Chef of the Year for 2004 by his own peers, Paul has been using the excuse of dog walking to scour the local woods for edible fungi over the last eight or nine years. Paul now hosts regular mushrooming weekends, teaching gently salivating guests in stout shoes to identify the bogus fungi amongst pungent outcrops of chaterelles, morels and the occasional, unimpeachable Cep
Now, originally, my fungal Highland fling was to have been offered up via the delights of the railway - the overnight sleeper from London to Fort William. Ever since crossing Europe in a couchette sleeping car pulled by a steam billowing leviathan in my youth rocked to sleep by the patter of bogey wheels on cold steel then tugged occasionally awake by the Doppler sponsored ding, ding, ding, ding, dong, dong, dong of passing level crossings before rising early to a Camping Gaz fire hazard brewing hot chocolate on the compartment floor - Ive nurtured an absurdly romantic ideal of rail travel. Truth is, however, the sleeper is not, Im told, what it once was, now boasting cramped, wipe-clean accommodation in which there isnt room to swing a rat and scant chance of a martini-fuelled dining encounter with some sultry temptress sporting diamonds that wouldnt look out of place in an ice bucket and a cigarette holder long enough to keep you in runner beans all summer.
Besides, if someone offered you the choice of the relentless drizzle of humorous mobile phone ring tones that is todays inter-city train and the use of a 177,500 Ferrari 612 Scaglietti for the weekend, youd have to be some sort of lunatic, newt-fancying Mayor of London with the IQ of a Ginger Nut biscuit to reply, No thanks. Ill take the train.
On any motorway, the fastest car in the world remains the hire car, so it isnt until the A82 writhes north out of Glasgow up the western banks of Loch Lomond that the Ferrari truly gets into its stride and we can spank the map in earnest. Have a care, though; bonny they may be but the banks of the loch have also spawned a road which is narrow, tortuous, permanently soggy and patrolled by lumbering juggernauts which cannot help but inhale the full width of the tarmac. The most dangerous road in Scotland runs along the north side of Loch Ness, where the mesmeric lure of its shimmering surface has elicited many a monstrous collision. But this has to run it a close second and brake-hungry feet have pummelled the milled aluminium footplate of the 612s passenger footwell more rigorously than Ginger Bakers bass drum by the time the road opens up through Glen Falloch, Strath Fillan and out over the bleak, lochan mottled expanse of Rannoch Moor.
Well be bringing you a full road test of the Scaglietti in a later issue of Lusso, so I wont dwell on it here except to say that this outrageous, 200mph motor car is as ugly as a box of frogs, turns heads like a streaker, is remarkably comfortable in the classic gran turismo tradition and, over the most majestic, sweeping A roads in the UK, so monstrously fast that it only really makes sense and sounds the part, when youre travelling at the sort of velocities that will instantly turn the faces of the local constabulary brick-red with incandescent rage as they fling the key to your cell far out into the nearest loch.
