As someone once observed, rich people are just poor people with money. By that logic, poor people must be rich people without money. I should let my bank manager know.

One of the many drawbacks about not having any job or income is, of course, being broke. Not that I'm complaining. As a house-sitter in the south of France I'm in the strange but undoubtedly wonderful position of living in a beautiful, modern, well-equipped residence in the middle of the Bordeaux countryside, but with the spending power of a teenager. A teenager who can't get a paper round. Hence the sudden interest in all that free food growing in the forest.

Identifying most edible stuff is easy but mushrooms pose an obvious problem - is it worth gambling on getting a tasty side-dish, at the risk of possible hospitalisation, or even death?
Luckily in France, you don't have to play mushroom roulette. If you are in any doubt about the edibility (I made up one of the words in this sentence), you just take them along to the local pharmacy who will let you know what's what - a brilliant arrangement. Being quite partial to staying alive, I decided to nip down to the local chemists with my assortment of wild fungi to try out this fab, free service.

The first hurdle was successfully negotiated as it was actually open (random opening hours are a characteristic of all French retailers - my pharmacy closes Tues mornings, Weds afternoons and all day Sat). Disappointingly though, the two staff on duty looked younger than my kids, but at least they confirmed that the fungus-checking service was good to go.
I produced the five varieties of mushroom that I had found. The two assistants looked sheepishly at each other in a way that suggested that they and mushrooms were strangers whose paths rarely crossed.
The more senior of the two, she was about twenty and newly qualified I decided, disappeared to find the under-employed mushroom chart. The other, in a move that was as disconcerting as it was surprising, roped in a customer to help out. I found myself losing my appetite. The customer was a very nice, rather ancient lady who looked puzzled and swiftly departed. She returned shortly later however with her older husband, an apparent mushroom expert. What were the chances of that, I wondered. The husband pointed at each of my five mushrooms and said 'oui, oui, non, non, oui.' Sorted then, two killers but I was ok with the other three.

I took my edible mushrooms home, persuaded Sal that all was fine, and prepared a bowl of mushrooms/ killer toadstools cooked in a mustard and garlic sauce. We sat opposite each other at the kitchen table, forks poised, in a scene reminiscent of the deer-hunter. Being a dedicated coward, I suggested that she should go first. The rationale being that as my French was better than hers, if we needed the emergency services, it would be better if It was me that was still alive to explain the problem. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't a winning argument.
I, chivalrously I like to think, swallowed a large spoonful and sat there for a moment, basically waiting to see if I died. Sal was an interested observer, slyly paying me rather more attention than I usually get, but not actually eating at all.

As you are reading my subsequent blog however, and it wasn't dictated from an emergency ward, clearly I enjoyed a better ending than (*spoiler-alert*) Christopher Walken suffered in the Deer Hunter. There are however many other varieties of mushroom growing in the forest and crucially, it's not my turn to go first next.