Payne's grey

One week ago a hint of winter crusted the tops of the parked cars and the seasonal scraping routine began, but hardly yet in earnest. Two days of soft ice to clear before another front brought cloud and relative mildness. The clouds have intensified this week and, as well as sculpting the sky in fantastic shapes and shades, have dropped a measurable sprinkle of water.

Monday morning's dawn glowed the garden in a striking colour as I looked out while the kettle filled. The sky showed recumbent pink wraiths, supporting clusters of mushroom caps in payne's grey. The colour theme was revisted this morning, with, as I drove to work, the grey intensifying and the pink tones replaced by pale blues, glimpsed through architectural layers of paler cloud.

A couple of cold nights have loosened the leaves a little, but most of the canopy is still shade, rather than litter. The cherries are going over to brittle brown, but the silver birches still show a light golden fortune in leaf pennies and the sycamores have started to dance across the spectrum, even from one side of a tree to the other. The custard maple has begun its descent towards dessert, showing a very pale yellow on some leaves, like custard made with too little powder.

Alice Roberts is decorating our TV screens weekly with a series on the "origins of us". Her assertion last week was that we are designed, as mammals, to run. Long legs, narrow waist, head supporting ligaments and hairless for effective heat control on the pre-historic African savannas. Quite a convincing argument; perhaps better than Desmond Morris' "body watching". This followed through from one of Bruce Parry's "tribe" episodes in which African hunters achieved their success essentially by out-running their prey, not in a sprint but in a war of pedestrian attrition. Convincing though these luminaries may be on anthropology, I feel they may have been beaten to the conclusion by Bruce Springsteen's "Born To Run".

I am uncertain how many landscape painters there may be operating in these times of economic uncertainty. Perhaps their numbers have been swelled by a few bankers on gardening leave. I can only recommend that, if the clouds continue as they have been for the last week, that an investment in the production of payne's grey might be worth your while.

a sharing of water vapour

My car was an autumn thing when I stepped out into the evening gloom yesterday. Parked as usual under the Westerly hedge, where it avoids the early frost of crisp winter evenings and provides both a parking habit and a regular walk to the side door I use to enter the building, it was slightly immersed in the leaf litter that is steadily obscuring the parking bays there. The Tyres appeared mired in a carpet and, on the roof and bonnet, a few stubborn leaves ignored the gentle tug of an attentuated breeze and gravity.

After badminton, or what passes for it in the Wednesday evening group I frequent, and the swift drink that I think is the real reason that some of the players attend, I had a quiet drive home. My own street, poorly served by municipal lighting, was bathed in the light of a near-full moon which shared its gap in the clouds with, what I take to be, Jupiter.

This morning we all shared a cloud, as mist defined the garden view. Only now burning off in a sunlight filtered through thin clouds. My car awaits another cover and I must work while the sun shines and the leaves fall.

The canopies are still almost full, but as the breeze played with the branches yesterday afternoon, I noticed a slow attrition as, every few seconds, another leaf would pull away and drift sideways to the ground. For now, the reformation of the canopy as ground-cover, is not evident. The abandoned foliage is hiding under hedges and in gutters, unobtrusive.

The trees are turning yellow gently, unless red. When I slowed for the custard maple yesterday I saw it still green, but it exists in a well sheltered spot. In fact, I would say that it is being crowded a little, other crowns are competing for its light.

It is another (perhaps the last?) week of mild weather, and although the evening are rapidly shortening, it is still pleasant, for a short while, to walk out in the evening air in a T-shirt; as far as the chippy or to put out the rubbish at any rate. The clouds have been very pretty and low recently, even when tragically lit by neon from below. Last night's full moon peeped through to provide a full atmospheric effect, but I don't remember the stars, or the satellites.

foals reunited

The end of last week was uncharacteristically warm for the time of year, and I had a snuffle. I slouched indoors for most of Saturday, but felt ready to test myself against the elements on Sunday morning, in pursuit of some contemporary reading. Turning the corner of our road, onto the main road towards the village centre, I realised that I had left the house without a tissue in my pocket. I sniffed.

Another hundred yards and I was following a pony along the road; a mare who was evidently a bit distressed, whinnying and tossing its head around. I guessed it had lost its friends and tried to remember if I'd seen a group of ponies on the green as I turned right, but no. We walked side-by-side a little and then I drew ahead and then heard an answering whinny from a foal; the situation became clearer.

Another local resident was just on their way out to find out what was going on, but I could see that the foal had got itself stuck on the lawn of the electricity board. The pedestrian gate to this property has a broken latch and once in a pony can't open it to get back out. The foal had evidently nosed the gate open and then got trapped. The mare was still a little way off, but now the two were closer, the panic had subsided a little. I propped the gate open and tried to persuade the foal that way, but it skittered along the fence line, failing to see the escape route. I tried to show the gate by walking out and making encouraging noises, but by this time the mare was patrolling the other side and the foal was distracted. I managed to move the mare so that the two could meet at the gate and the foal, after a reassuring nuzzle, walked slowly through the gap. The mare of course, realising the length and quality of the grass on the other side, walked straight in to the enclosure.

I went back in, hoping the foal would stay still, which it did. The mare was easier to corral than the foal, less nervous of humans and probably used to being chased off people's lawns. After a couple of feints, she ducked back out of the gate and the family walked off up the road, keeping close. I was streaming by this time, so I had to improvise with some grass to clean my hand up, before heading to the shops again.

On the way back from the village, by a different route, I surprised a squirrel on a fence. It evidently hadn't planned an escape route from its position of sitting on top of a fence that terminated in an open gateway. The nearest tree was just a shrubby thing and when it leapt in panic it fell straight through the foliage and had to leap back onto a trunk from the ground. I expect it felt embarassed about this all day.

I passed, what I always regard as the most beautiful tree in the village in autumn, an ornamental acer. Tired and emotional with my snuffle, it took me by surprise and took my breath for a second. It looked like a tree dipped, one side, in drying blood and then replanted with hardly a leaf out of place. I plucked one of the rare fallen, stained leaves to take home with me.