Peter Timms’s Making Nature is a delight. I found it especially enjoyable because I have been reading massively for my next book, so it was a remarkable break to take six contemplative walks with Timms and the many who accompany him, not in the flesh but in the word: Rousseau, Augustine, Petrarch, Edmund Burke, Kant, and a host of others, instructing, disrupting, agreeing.

One who did actually accompany him was Rebecca Maxwell, blind since birth, who showed him a new forest on the fifth walk, entitled ‘Sensations and Perceptions’. She showed me a new way of sensing things, too. She can feel density. In a room, she knows where windows are: