Let me tell you about my mother. For twenty-five years, five, sometimes six, days a week, she drove the same fifty miles, following the main roads and back roads of her mail route, which included some five hundred households. She left home before six in the morning, dropping my sisters and me off with one babysitter or another—unless my father had a later shift at the grocery store, where he worked as a clerk—until we were old enough to stay home and wait for the bus by ourselves. In the course of her career, which also included a dozen earlier years on other routes, she drove an old postal jeep that she’d bought for a song, as rural letter carriers were often responsible for providing their own delivery vehicles. It was the boxy kind you’d imagine as a Matchbox toy, or that Norman Rockwell might paint. Its steering wheel was on the passenger side, making deliveries easier and safer, but it wasn’t designed for the era of online shopping, so later she switched to a regular minivan. That had plenty of room for packages but required her to straddle the front seat, stretching her left hand out to hold the steering wheel while delivering mail from the passenger window with her right. She told me it was only ever a problem when she was nine months pregnant, which she was three times; each time, she delivered the mail until she went into labor, though the last time, with my younger sister, her best friend did the driving during her final week, because her belly was too big to fit beside the center console.
I do not say what I am thinking, which is: people who are truly uncomfortable without their phones don’t leave them on stone walls in the rain. I need to be an exemplar of patience, if only because I so often try the patience of others.
As we approach an intersection made blind by fresh greenery, my wife hands me her glasses.
“Will you clean these?” she says.
Young as he was back then, Hoberman’s an old head now, a veteran of The Village Voice in its heyday and an éminence grise of a dying art. Fresh from a stint of “bumming around Mexico,” Hoberman published his first piece of film criticism in the Voice in 1972, a belated appreciation of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures nine years after its premiere at the Bleecker Street Cinema, thus initiating his four-decade association with the paper. In Everything Is Now, this rite of passage into professionalism—and, therefore, adulthood—signals the precise moment when the ’60s called it a night, delimiting a timeline that is more personal than definitive: “In a sense,” he writes, that article “planted the seed for this book, which I consider a memoir, although not mine.”
When newts go a-wooing, sometime in the spring, their signature move is the handstand. Girl newts cluster round to watch, while the boy newts flip on to their creepily human hands and shake their tails in the air. The waggiest newt is the winner, although the actual act of love is a strictly no-contact sport. The male deposits a packet of sperm on an underwater leaf for the female to collect and insert into her own reproductive tract. The whole business is best thought of, says Karen R Jones, as a “sexually charged game of pass-the-parcel”.
This kind of anthropomorphising often strikes naturalists as unscientific or even downright distasteful. But Jones is an environmental historian and her methodology allows, indeed impels, her to start from the principle that Britain’s human and animal populations are culturally entwined. Consequently, we cannot “see” a fox, hedgehog or newt without bringing to it a rich stew of presumptions and fantasy, drawn from childhood picturebooks, out-of-date encyclopedias and, in my case, the 1970s TV classic Tales of the Riverbank, in which small critters say funny things in the West Country burr of .