There's a certain kind of travel article in which this story would begin before sunrise. We would gather in the hushed pre-dawn, in the lee of some ancient wood, breath misting in the morning chill. There would be a guide eerily in tune with nature and probably older than nature herself.
We would tramp for hours through damp forest and we would find either enormous numbers of wild mushrooms of offputting hue but incredible flavour, or nothing at all. . . if the latter, we would return home laden down with memories and hungry for the good things our hostess has planned for our six-course lunch.
In the real world, we went in a Clio, we drove for about 20 minutes and parked at the edge of a few acres of oak woods, and we strayed maybe 500 yards from the car. And we picked the kids up from school on the way home. Ah, so this is mushrooming, the way actual French people do it. Less romantic, but ever so authentic. And guess what? Cepes galore for dinner.
We three who set out were none of us much in tune with mother nature, since we work variously in a garlic factory, a car-parts supplier and a local school, but we do live on the edge of the Foret de la Greseigne, an enormous oak forest in the south of France. Two of us, at least, know a cepe from a crepe.
And it was, I admit, before dawn when I set out. But when the sun rose I was still drinking coffee in my next-door-neighbour Sabine's kitchen, watching something dubbed from Welsh on TV.
The third of us, Suzu, had been at the pétanque the night before and "faisait glug-glug", said Sabine's husband. She was, perhaps as a result, late. Nobody was particularly concerned.
The sun was warm on our backs by the time we set off, but we were in plenty of time for there was only one other car, a red Mégane, parked at the side of the road. We pulled in behind it, then trooped 20 yards down a track, turned into a patch of forest and started falling over mushrooms.
In the other version of the story I'd be explaining how the mushroom is really the fruiting part of the fungus, the main plant being a mess of filaments beneath the forest litter, da da dee, da da da, but that's just complicating matters. The facts of mushrooming are simple. Either it's Bon (okay) or it's Pas Bon (not okay).
Using the Pas Bon method, you ignore anything that isn't exactly what you have in mind. Today, anything that looks like something I may have gathered in Wexford on my summer holidays is Pas Bon. It has gills. Gills are Pas Bon. What you want is a kind of sponge underneath. But not that one (the one I'm holding up).
That one looks almost exactly like what you're looking for, but it's not quite right. The cells in the sponge are too big and the wrong shape. And the stalk is too thin. It hardly matters, but there are two kinds of pas bon which look very alike.
There's the Pas Bon that will make you sick, and the Pas Bon that will make you even sicker. The second sort has a green-yellow sponge that turns violet when you crush it.
Left to my own devices, I'd have spent hours riffling through some Pocket Guide to Fungus trying to identify stuff. But using the Pas Bon method we gathered just some kind of cepe and something orange which is, it seemed, called Orange. Don't pick an Orange unless it grows out of something startlingly like an eggshell. No eggshell, no survive unscathed.
Astonishingly, I learned to tell a good cepe from a bad cepe. Even though they're half the size of a pinhead, you can see that the cells of the sponge of the Bon are indeed of a certain shape and texture.
We dug the slugs out of my first Bon cepe with my knife and in it went, into my reusable carrier bag. I looked at the bag and reflected that it's a long time since Centra was Just A Walk Away.
In two hours, I gathered 1.5 kilos of edible cepes: Suzu, despite her excess of glug glug, gathered five times this. I roasted mine with potatoes that evening.
They were, in a word, glorious.
Why was this so gloriously satisfying? We were just tramping around a wood, moaning about our colleagues and laughing like drains when we fell in a ditch, but we were having more fun than a rat in an egg shed.
This, presumably, is why so many people go mushrooming, which admittedly is not without its risks.
The best comparison I can draw for you, Irish Times reader, is that it's like a really good day at the sales. . . and without anyone's elbow in your face.