The village where we lived was very upmarket. I can’t mention names, but an eighties TV personality had a residence there, a sprawling, ornate mansion with lush green gardens surrounding it. My friend Tom nudged me one day, and gestured for me to follow him.

“Look at these!” he said, furtively diving into his coat pocket and revealing a bag of mushrooms.

They were psilocybin, long slender stems with the unmistakable cap on the top.

“Tom! Where did you get those?” I whispered with glee, looking over my shoulder for any approaching teachers.

“You’ll never guess… in [Celebrity]’s back yard! There’s only a stone wall off the footpath, let’s go and get some more.”

After school, there were four of us, traipsing up the country lane that led to Celebrity’s grounds. We clambered over the wall and began searching for these miracle fungi, the ground was fertile and we found reams of them, clustered together in groups of twenty or fifty.

Later that evening it was “tea time”. It was a Friday night, we had no school the following day, and I was on a mission to quite literally ‘get out of my head’. These were the days before the internet, and none of us really knew what we were doing, we just tipped all the mushrooms, around two hundred in total, into a saucepan and boiled them for half an hour or so.

The tea tasted earthy. I grimaced, but swallowed a good mugful, then sat back and waited.

Half an hour went by. Nothing. I drank another mugful. Tom started giggling, and pointing at the carpet.

“Look at that!” His eyes were wide, pupils like saucers, the blue all but disappeared. I saw nothing apart from a grimy, seventies patterned carpet, threadbare in places. There was a succulent plant on the windowsill, and suddenly I saw the plant move. The leaves were pulsing and waving, the plant brought to life by the hallucinogens that had flooded my senses. I felt light, euphoric, as if I was drunk, and I started laughing maniacally.

“Let’s go for a walk!” Tom and I, and a couple of others, headed out into the night. The headlights of the cars were like flowing rivers, undulating and rippling as the cars rolled past, life in glorious colour and slow motion. I was high. I was on top of the world, in the most dazzling, glamorous place. Until it went wrong – a pattern that would repeat over my entire life.

I started to itch. My skin was burning, and I stared at my arms, red blotches appearing – even through the mushroom haze, I could see that this was not right. I felt very unwell, my throat was burning, and panic started to set in.

I called a taxi home, and stumbled through the door.

“Mum, I had some mushrooms and I don’t feel well.” I slurred. Mum took one look at me and called 999, she sat me down on the sofa, and gently stroked my hair. At that point, all my rage had dissipated, I was grateful for my Mum’s caring presence, grateful for the safety and security of my home. I was terrified. I was a fifteen year old girl, dabbling in things that no child should ever touch, and it had come back to bite me, hard, on the backside.

The ambulance arrived in due course, the paramedic accompanied by – my heart dropped into the very soles of my Doc Martens – a police officer. In the Nineties it was policy to send an officer to any drug-related ambulance calls, a far cry from the overstretched, exhausted emergency services we have in 2025. They were both kindly and reassuring, joking with me, the officer even saying he though magic mushrooms were a myth. I assured him, no, they are real things. Thankfully neither of them asked where they came from, as back then it would have made the news.

The paramedic examined me and instantly realised I was having an allergic reaction. I was bundled off to hospital and there my ordeal got far worse. I was fifteen. Legally, despite my objections, I was a child, so I was despatched to a children’s ward.

Some sadist had decided to decorate the ward with cartoon characters and giant paper oak leaves suspended from the ceiling. I was hallucinating, my mind out of my control, my body was screaming against the effect of the psilocybin and I was at the mercy of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.

The characters came to life. The oak leaves swirled and waved, I rammed my fists into my eyes, trying to make it all stop, curled into a little ball of total desolation. At that point I wondered if I would wake up with my mind intact.