Black is black

When I think about my funeral - as one does - one thing I am certain of is that I do not want flowers. The cut flower trade is profoundly unethical and I hate the thought of bouquets air-miled in from the industry of exploited and underpaid third world workers. And native wild flowers I would prefer to be left growing. Instead I like the idea of my coffin/grave/pyre or whatever being heaped with natural vegetation, leaves, twigs, grass, ferns, seaweed, shells and pebbles - and mushrooms of course, if the season allows.

Should I expire in the back end of the year (when I was born - my mother got fed up with bunches of chrysanthemums), then these sombre specimens would surely be ideal to grace a mycologist's funeral. All found on today's wet stomp in the woods, here are Bulgaria inquinans (top left) resembling soft sucked liquorice, the rigid digits of (top right) Xylaria polymorpha or Dead Men's Fingers, the burnt bun of a Cramp Ball Daldinia concentrica (bottom right), and finally, although only partly fungal, Peltigera or Dog Lichen like a dusky lettuce leaf.

(The song is etched in my memory from a slow, hot ferry journey from Ancona in Italy to Haifa in Israel when it seemed to be played on a continuous loop through the loudspeaker as we baked and starved for 3 days on a scorching deck.)