An unexpected trip to Scarborough …

I’m pretty good at making connections, seeing the patterns around me, understanding the inter-relationships between events and thoughts, thoughts and actions, actions and results.

What do I mean? Here let me show you… Hold very tight please!
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So I’m on the phone to Mr. Chorley yesterday and suddenly he tells me that he has some rather strange looking fungi growing on the bank in his garden. Mr. C. has something nasty; he’s quarantined, working from home, gazing out of his window.
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Now I’m quite interested in Mushrooms and toadstools, so I asked him what they looked like and when he told me I was certain that I knew what it was he had there growing on his bank, but just to be sure I asked him to send me a photo. I was right. It was Amanita muscaria, commonly known as the fly agaric or fly amanita.
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FA, as us mycologists call it, is both poisonous and psycoactive, which means if you eat one it’ll will make you pretty ill AND give you some pretty weird hallucinations. Yes, Mr C. had magic mushrooms growing in his back garden, or at least one form of them.
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Fly agaric is the quintessential toadstool, its white-spotted, deep red mushroom shape is often found in Children’s books and on lawns in old ladies gardens resplendent with some species of faerie or elf sitting on its spotted cap. Its name, fly agaric, doesn’t refer to the insect, but to the delirium that results from eating the fungus, based on the medieval belief that flies could enter a person's head and cause mental illness.
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Maybe flies entered the head of Arthur Conan Doyle’s father, the artist and poet, Charles Altamont Doyle. Charles came from a very ‘Arty’ family - his father, John Doyle, was the famous political cartoonist "HB" while his older brother, "Dicky" Doyle, was a prominent illustrator, best known for his work with Punch magazine. His other brother, Henry, was also an accomplished artist and became the director of the National Gallery in Ireland.
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Poor Charles had a lot to live up to, but although he had a great deal of artistic talent he never managed to earn a living from his artwork, so instead worked as a draughtsman in Scotland. It was Charles who designed the fountain at Holyrood Palace and that, along with begetting his son, became his most famous accomplishment.
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He illustrated books, wrote articles, had a loving wife and family, but none of it was enough to keep his inherent feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem at bay. He began to drink, and over time became so addicted to the booze that his health started to decline. Eventually he lost his job, developed delirium tremens, and began to see fairies and elves.
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In 1881 he was admitted to an asylum. He continued to draw, creating some of his best work, and keeping sketchbooks which he filled with water-colours and pen-and-ink drawings. Most of his work featured elves, faeries, and other whimsical creatures which he tried to use to prove of his sanity, telling the asylum staff that he was drawing the little-people that he could see so clearly.
On October 10, 1893 Charles Altamont Doyle suffered a severe epileptic fit and died just another lunatic in the madhouse.
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His son, Arthur, went on to be the creator of Sherlock Holmes and spent much of his life trying to prove his Father’s sanity by investigating the supernatural and claiming that fairies were real, his most famous proof being the photograph’s taken back in 1916 by Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright, two young girls who lived in the village of Cottingley in West Yorkshire, who produced the most famous fairy pictures in the history of photography.
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Arthur was entirely convinced by the photographs and to demonstrate this he published The Coming of the Fairies in 1922, recounting the story of the photographs, guaranteeing them as genuine, and declaring his unshakeable belief in fairies. One of the girls, Frances Griffiths, moved to Scarborough in the 1920's…and so finally we reach our destination.
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Mr Chorley, magic mushrooms, faeries, flies in the brain, madness, more faeries, Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, still more faeries, Scarborough. There, I told you that I’m pretty good at making connections, and all that from a chance glance out of the window from Mr. C.
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What a journey, everybody off please!