Sporegate 2010: In which Ginger commits a spore-based faux pas

Image credit.
 I can't see a hairy high top here. It's possible they're actually called "Ink Cap".

I live with three other people - the Boy (Shannon),  a woman named Jo and a man named James. Every one I live with is super cool, so I'm pretty lucky in that regard. James is especially eccentric, spends about 90% of his non-working  week at his girlfriend's house or at his studio, and when at the flat is usually gardening, brewing something bizarre, cooking something he's foraged for, or practicing charcuterie.

Anyways, I haven't seen James really since last Sunday when he came back from a trip down South with his family. He rushed into the house while Jo, Shannon and I were eating dinner and he was very excited because he'd found an edible mushroom in Frank Kitts Park that was called a hairy high top (or something like that. Not sure of the name now). It was a big mushroom, but I was a bit doubtful about it's edible nature which wasn't a big issue as right then I needed to go to bed in a huff because of a pre dinner mop-based bickering/snapping session I'd had with Shannon. I had no interest in hairy high tops when my mop-putting-away abilities had recently had such aspersions cast upon them.

James and hairy high tops have been notably absent for the last few days and I have been in a rather intolerant, snippy sort of mood for the last couple of weeks, so this morning when I saw that James had been painting and using one of my beautiful Crown Lynn plates as a dish to mix his paints on, I huffily rinsed it off and put it in the dishwasher. I really had no intention of broaching the subject with him because 1. I am terrible at any kind of communication/confrontation in this regard, and 2. I figured he'd just vagued out, forgotten that he'd even started mixing it, and that it would sit on the deck for the next few days until somebody else moved it anyway.

OH NO I WAS SO WRONG. It turns out that this dish was not just covered in drying out black acrylics or ink! In actual fact it was hairy high top spores that James is using to make some kind of art type thing! We had a spectacular passive-aggressive off in the kitchen, where I told him NOT to use my plates to mix his art supplies on, he told me he had no idea what Crown Lynn plates even looked like, and that the material I'd biffed without a second thought was his spores. After my self righteousness had worn off I felt terrible knowing that I'd washed his spores down the drain. And then annoyed that I felt so bad. But: Can you believe that I could be so heartless? I need to apologise to him. But he's left the house in a huff and I'm not sure when I'll see him again. And then I'm like - "ugh but my plates are so precious to me!" But then I think - "oh but people are more important than things" and "I should try and be more tolerant/communicative".

I told Shannon all this on the way to the bottle shop and he laughed on and off the whole time we were shopping for beer and all the way home. For I know he could be chuckling away in his bedroom as we speak.