Show me the way to go home

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 

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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 single jet aeroplane, a flaming red arrow, heading to a place I will never know and likely never visit. The gale last week—and gales and November go together like April and ‘shoures’—ripped the leaves off almost everything arboreal except the holly and oak; at the top of the bare ash, the revealed blot of a magpie’s nest.

Silence, except for the slight slush of my feet through the wet leaf litter, the panting of the labrador, the chinking of a blackbird and, at the far end of the wood, the fading radio chatter of starlings— the sounds of a wood settling down for the night. Then, nearby, the scream of a jay, and a diminishing glimpse of the light-bulb flash of its rump. And the darkening silence lies in shards.