He would always begin in a strop, having grown disenchanted with the world
And its ever dwindling population of insects
And ever expanding population of cows

hummmmmmm

But as the nights yawned wider
He would soften
And hum gently in a corner

Newt was many things
But to me, Newt was and will remain a stink.

For a Mole listens with a finely tuned nose,
and the smell of a Newt in the nose of
a Mole

is incandescent with stories.

Newt’s stink spoke in deep time, painting pictures of the Eocene with its hot-tempered earth and the teething of tectonic plates.

No ice, not a single shiver, and not a single cow.

Not by fighting it to the death in some heroic siege, but by seeking refuge in the armpits of the Carpathian mountains. Curled up, he would read the geomorphological tales written in the rocks, or waltz gently to and fro to glacial rumbles.

Then there were the stories of when the ice did return and Earth froze Newt’s knuckles hard and he only just survived the Last Glacial Maximum.

Sometimes his smell stank of refusal mingling with scents of dissent, of fugitivity in the face of poisoned ponds and lands lost. Newt’s smell would tell not of the end of the world, but the end of a world; of a quiet revolution led by the revolting, the awkward, the introverted, out on leftover limbs...