Francis stopped loading the capsules abruptly, hoping to interrupt his obsessive recollections. He needed a walk, a cold, fast walk through the woods before it grew dark, which at this time of year would be in about two hours. He left the mushrooms behind, after putting the finished capsules into a Ziploc bag. As the world descended into catastrophe, the psychedelic renaissance had arrived just in time to catch its fall, thought Francis, with a half-smile, but also with the sense that there were dangerously few alternatives. Poets, the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’, were now the acknowledged casualties of literature; politicians seemed to be recruited exclusively from the locked wards of psychiatric hospitals, and protesters, in the absence of poets to write their scripts and politicians to legislate their demands, could only grow more strident and desperate as they vied for attention with the better funded organisations they were protesting against – Occupy Wall Street, for example, had not distracted Wall Street from its occupation. On the drive to San Francisco from Big Sur, Francis had seen a banner saying, ‘Fuck You and Your Corporate Pride’, without being able to catch whose corporate pride deserved to be fucked. Perhaps it was a universal denunciation. In any case, in the absence of poetry, politics and precise protest, there seemed to be little choice but to turn to psychedelics for a cure to a global malaise. Universities were now falling over each other to study the effects of psilocybin, and its therapeutic value for those suffering from chronic depression and destructive addictions was astonishing, far better than any manufactured compounds. How could a pharmaceutical company, messing about for the last few decades, hope to compete with the expertise of fungi, which had been luring animals to disperse their spores for millions of years? Not only were the results magnificent but, by all accounts, there was an unusual atmosphere of collaboration between the university departments focused on this study, as if they were being guided by the psilocybin to form mycorrhizal networks, to fuse and transfer information, to branch and explore without losing a sense of shared purpose and basic unity. As he put the new bag of capsules next to the many other bags in a cool, dim corner of the larder, Francis had to recognise that if there were ever a call to promote awe, universal goodwill and personal breakthrough in West Sussex, he was unusually well placed to help.