It's a real flavour of the forest on your plate.'' Not everyone, he accepts, will want to turn fungi into haute cuisine. Nothing is wasted - scraps go into stocks or to make mushroom ketchup; any abundance of ceps will be dried and preserved.Firstly, there are a selection of seven different mushrooms, each tasting distinctly differently, each cooked very lightly, served around a chicken and mushroom "sausage". "There's always that risk with fungi, isn't there?" Mr Marren also said that it was important that people should learn how to identify and cook edible fungi.Back at the restaurant, Mr Aitken is delighted with the pick and prepares a spectacular meal designed to illustrate the diverse possibilities of fungal cuisine. It doesn't stop him nibbling away and offering samples around for tasting. You can survive a death cap, which is the most deadly of all, but you will probably need new kidneys.''He clearly gets a frisson of excitement from the more exotic varieties. Ballesteros's eyes flashed, his lips pursed, and then he asked, "Are you saying I cannot play any more?"That really wasn't what was being said, even if it was what the world was beginning to think Maybe it was also what the great Seve was thinking. Whatever the truth of that, the sadness, and in the personal context of one of the most thrilling sportsman of any age it is a terrible one, is that this taut little exchange happened around 15 years ago.
Fifteen years is a long time to turn yourself on a spit and in a week when golf was showing every sign of growing up along with the bewitchingly talented Hawaiian girl Michelle Wie, Seve's torment was like some throwback to medieval cruelty. Surely monks have had more fun thrashing themselves in their cells than Ballesteros did slipping 14 strokes off the pace in the Madrid Open.One experienced golf writer said that watching Ballesteros return to tournament golf after a two-year absence required not just the squeamish to watch the action from between the fingers of the hands covering their faces. Sad, this, in the week when the astonishing Wie heard that she is just one qualifying tournament away from competing in the oldest major title, a decision of the Royal and Ancient, which, by their old standards, was rocket-style confirmation that the world has moved into the 21th century. Meanwhile, Ballesteros slips further into the vortex of his own making.The worrying thing is the length of Ballesteros's crisis. It isn't a slump or a trough: it is terminal misery.The man who gave us such exquisite pleasure is making a trade of misery and in the process turning the point of sport, and especially golf, on its head. He is also doing the same to the meaning of his glorious career.
He should be remembered for the surge of the spirit that came when you saw him marching over the brow of a fairway, as proud as an conquistador, not as a beggar at the mercy of fate.Two horrific flashpoints of memory: Rochester, New York, Ryder Cup, 1995... Ballesteros in the singles against Tom Lehman on the last day, scarcely hitting a fairway but scrambling sublimely at times. He walked up so many hills around the fairways and the greens he might have been one of the men of the watching Duke of York. Ballesteros suffered, he battled, and miraculously he stayed in touch with Lehman, just one down at the turn Then he couldn't keep beating the odds.
