Nightwalking alone and unencumbered by everyday life is, says Lewis-Stempel, “intoxicating. You can never be so free as you are at night under the moon and stars. You could drown in the delight of it.”

In this, the darkest season, the dark is in retreat. Light pollution – from houses, streetlamps, office blocks, shop windows – cuts us off both from the stars and from the proper, sightless state of the night. Yet, as John Lewis-Stempel points out in this latest love song to the natural world, 70 per cent of all animals are nocturnal. “Nature abhors waste,” he says, “including wasted time”, and nocturnality allows life to utilise every scrap of it. The night is earth’s largest habitat, and when we close our curtains and our minds to it, we miss wonders.

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