Plodding home in the gloaming, through a wood stripped bare by November gales, John Lewis-Stempel stumbles across a magical fairy ring of wood-blewit fungi.
Into the November wood, the low mist seeping in from a Victorian graveyard. And it is cold, the sort of cold that enters the marrow of the bone and the core of the soul. Ahead in the ash tree, a roosting pigeon is puffed into a ball and birch trees are already studded by stars. Overhead in the late evening sky, a…