Fungi, and a man who cannot stop grinning about them. I didn't mind a bit.

October, the week the field behind the chapel came up in waxcaps — the pink ones, and the ones that smell of honey — which is the single week of the year in which I have any real expertise, so my timing was good.

He is so pleased about all of it! Every chapter has the tone of somebody who has just come in from the garden with something balanced on a piece of slate to show you. I braced myself for that to become wearing and it never did, mostly because the science underneath is properly difficult and he doesn't smooth it out on my behalf. The section on how a mycelial network solves a problem without anything you could sensibly call a decision-maker, I read three times and could not have explained afterwards, and I was perfectly content about that.

Two things I would push back on. He takes psilocybin and writes it up, and that is the least interesting chapter in the book, which I suspect surprised him. And the business at the end with the cider and his own fruiting bodies is a stunt. Charming, but a stunt.

The lichen chapter is the best thing here by a distance. A lichen is not one organism doing a job; it is a question about where an individual stops and something else starts. He lets that sit for a while without hammering it flat, which took more restraint than the rest of the book shows.

I have since gone and bought a hand lens and a small paper bag habit. My husband is not thrilled.