Thirty one years of the same wall.

Read it in the winter. Most of it in the mornings before the light came up properly.

I have lived on the marsh for thirty one years. I thought I knew what was underneath it. I didn't.

The book is about fungi. That sounds like a small subject. It isn't. There is more of it under a field than there is standing up in the field.

He starts with truffles. Dogs and pigs and men in Italy who won't tell each other anything. Then he goes to lichens and that is the chapter I keep going back to.

A lichen is not one thing. It is an alga and a fungus living as one body. Sometimes a yeast in there as well. So what counts as one individual gets difficult very fast, and it doesn't get settled. I went out and looked at the wall by the gate after that chapter. Same wall. Thirty one years of the same wall. It looked different.

There is a chapter on the wood wide web. Trees joined up underground by fungal threads. Sugar going one way. Warnings going another. He is careful here. He says the evidence is real but the story people tell about it has run out ahead of the evidence. I liked him for saying so. Most would have kept the better story and said nothing.

He makes cider from a tree he grew himself. He grows oyster mushrooms on a copy of his own book and then eats them. That ought to be annoying. It isn't.

The psilocybin chapter I could have done without. Not because I object to it. Because it's the part everyone talks about and it is the least interesting thing in here.

My husband asked what I was reading and I told him about the fungus that gets into an ant and walks it up a stem and makes it bite down before it dies. He asked me to stop. I didn't stop.

Some of the writing is too pleased with itself. Now and again a sentence goes up on tiptoe. But he explains well and he doesn't talk down, and when I lost the thread I read it again and the second time it was all there.

What I took away is smaller than the big ideas in it. Rot is not an ending. It is a slow handing over. Everything on the marsh that goes down is being taken apart by something and passed along to something else. I have watched that for three decades without having a word for it.

There is a section on mycorrhizal fungi and roots. I have been putting compost round the apple trees for years and thinking of it as feeding the trees. It isn't. It is feeding the things that feed the trees. That is a different job and I have been doing it half wrong.

The book is a good object as well. Decent paper. There are threads printed on the endpapers.

Nine. I've bought two more copies. One is for my brother, who farms and does not read books. He will read it or he won't.

Since January I look at rotten wood on the beach differently. Break a piece open and there are white threads all through it. They were always in there.