Well it has taken five years but we have finally done it. Motivated by hearing tales of one of the best ever years for ceps (a type of edible mushroom if you didn’t know) we went searching in our own little woodland and lo and behold we actually found a couple of kilogrammes of them.

Because there are always stories about people picking mushrooms in France for their tea and succumbing to fatal food poisoning hours later, we had them checked out, and all was well. Among others, pharmacists and farmers in France can tell you if you have picked a magnificent crop of ceps, or alternatively whether you need to rush off and scrub your hands with bleach for an hour in a desperate attempt to remove the toxins already making their way to your vital organs.

Then we made an omelette. I think we were still all a bit nervous as we ate, and for hours afterwards I was wondering if I was suffering from the onset of dizziness and hallucinations. Which of course I wasn’t – I was just overtired from not sleeping well the night before.

So now we can hold our heads high – we have done what French country folk do, despite the enormous risk that it involved.

One of the people I cycle with fell off his bike in over-excitement when he saw a large cep growing at the edge of a quiet country road, and he has been telling me for weeks I needed to get down to the woods and start looking. At the weekends the back-roads around here have a car parked in every gap in the trees, as elderly locals – and sometimes whole families – hack about in the woods in search of ceps.

Do they eat them or sell them? I don’t know. Our couple of kilogrammes would have cost 30 euros to buy, and presumably if we were more sharp-eyed we would have found quite a lot more. There could easily have been 100 euros worth more under our feet that we trampled as we searched – they are pretty hard to spot and conceal themselves, as you might guess, in dark and shady spots.

Were they nice? Well, to be frank they were less exciting than I thought. We followed a classic old recipe from Elizabeth David. Fry the heads (they are perhaps 10-15 cm across) on one side, then the other, in loads of olive oil. Before they have finished cooking, add the stalks, quite well chopped, with a couple of cloves of crushed and chopped garlic. Continue cooking for a few minutes then eat.

Despite my daughters insistence, tomato ketchup probably is not a crucial part of the experience.

Leaving mushrooms behind, now I’m a bit stuck, because I chose the title of this section because it was amusing, to me at least, but does leave the tricky problem that I need to write something about slugs or rock and roll.

Well, after a slug free year, when Mrs B went to bring the houseplants back inside for the autumn / winter this week, she found that thousands of almost invisibly small slugs had almost completely devoured her prized orchids and several other plants.

Rock and roll? I downloaded a song for one of our daughters this week, and she has played it continuously on repeat for the last 72 hours, while singing along at full voice. So now I’ve disconnected the electric circuit that leads to her bedroom and told her that her stereo is broken. Ha ha ha.