Autumn's leafy bonfires outclassed

Autumn colours, faded now to sombre shades;
befitting the death of a house.
Lit by smouldering fronts of embering reed,
the lights of a dozen emergency response vehicles.
Blue, flickering, pulsing, on the column of smoke glow.
Busy black ants played their hoses onto weather-proofed thatch.
To no avail.

Autumn, delivered

To the West of my home, one third mile or thereabouts, is the most beautiful tree in the village. I should qualify and state that it is the most beautiful in Autumn and, as usual, this year it has turned a stunning red with sparse orange and yellow highlights. Every year on my way round the village of a Sunday morning some time around now, I will whimsically stoop and collect a few leaves before they are pulped by passing cars and cause hazard to cyclists. They soon dry out and lose their lustre but I gain a brief pleasure from them.

Last week's storm caused a certain amount of chaos locally. I needed four attempts before managing to leave the village early on Monday morning due to fallen trees and road closures, probably resulting from flooding or the works to prevent the same. I eventually found a narrow route round the major tree collapse; too small to be signed as a diversion. I finally emerged 20 metres beyond the road block, turning North against the stalled flow of delivery lorries waiting for the chains saws to complete their buzzing.

On Sunday we tested our resolve and strength against the gathering blow on the top of Hurst Spit. Minor rain storms swept through in minutes, damping us and adding an edge to the otherwise warm wind; spume blew over the spit into the salt-marsh; seas were two men high.

Pausing in the front garden this morning my eye was caught by a red leaf. The storm was near due West, I wonder if this year the tree came to us?

One side of the A31 or the other

White spider silk sheets,
mist laden, usher autumn's
redecoration

Running hot and cold

I remember the child; with simple instructions; always run the hot first. In his innocence the child was sometimes chilled in deep water or scalded in shallow.

The man, filling the morning shaving basin, stands. Not yet straight from the nights curled slumber, not too tall for the bathroom mirror (installed as ever by midgets). Almost entirely subconscious knowledge flows around him: Is he first to use the bathroom; has he showered; the overnight temperature sometimes running off the single-glazed pane. The hot tap first of course, but whether to allow a single swirled rinse or to let some portion of the cool copper empty before the plug? A moment now of repose, leaning gently, arms stretched out, hands just below the taps as the water level rises. Eyes closed he hears the approaching symphony of creaking pipes, expansion playing the un-insulated pipes against wooden joists or, eyes open, watches the roiling vortices where convection currents are tangled by the incoming flow and, in the winter, the puffs of vapour reach up to the glass to gather and drip once more.

No need to risk a finger, the older skin feels infra-red from an inch away and correlates the vapour level, the patterns of refraction and that more trustworthy internal timepiece. The first cupped handful holds no surprise. Warm enough to soften bristle, but not to open pores; comforting heat in the winter to assuage the colder soap, refreshing in summer to rinse the nighttime sweats. All the way to the rinse, not focused on spillage, on the motion of hands, the closing of eyes, but senses alive to the waking of the house, the world, the homemaking automata, the mass transport systems, the annual swelling of the spiders and plans for the weekend.

heavy drinking

Much to my surprise the weather has been hugely warm. My surprise is enhanced because I was in England and on holiday last week, by the beach, and the sun was hot enough to cause spontaneous swimming as much as twice a day. Just to return to reality though, the sea water was still immensely cold; almost painful and certainly unwise for more than 15 minutes at a time.

I have been in the garden doing agricultural woodwork over this weekend, and fascinated by the year's progress as marked in my mind today by butterflies. We've had whites and beautiful large whites, gatekeepers, meadow browns, I suspect ringlets too. I had to release a peacock from the shed. A medium large orange/brown butterfly has been too illusive however. It is either a fritillary or a large example of a comma; the wings don't appear to be very cryptic, but the overall impression of colour would be right. Adding confusion was a sighting nearby on Thursday of something that was almost certainly a comma, and smaller.

The local bird population has been panting a lot and pressing themselves to collect the hot sun, presumably as a parasite control. I had a good sighting (for the summer time) of a wren on the trellis by the kitchen window and a stunning young female blackbird; very brown and still slightly speckled.

Working into the dusk I noticed the almost-full moon and hoping to repeat a sighting of a hedgehog I made last week, I moved round to sit with my back to the front-door and listened. The soundscape here has been very quiet today and the usual background noises were soft; a train going North, people locking up for the evening and shuffling windows to collect some cool (there has been a breeze today), cooling ticks from window frames and roofs. At the time marked by the emergence of the first half dozen stars I heard the snuffling and rustling progress of the hog. I think it must arrive under the pedestrian gate, cross the border and the front path and then go up the drive. I watched him/her cross the stones back into shelter over the path and could then only follow by sound again.

As I sat, the bright moon swung round and an apparently innocuous patch of cloud from the South grew slowly. I notice that this cloud flickered, lighting up like a fluorescent feature. As it approached closer I saw it thicker than I had thought; a patch of water vapour looking for trouble. By the time it was covering about twenty degrees above the horizon I could hear a faint rumble with it. A cloud concealing the arc-welder of the apocalypse? So far it has stayed over the Solent, but I think I detect the smell of rain for the first time in 18 days (or there about).

Eleven pm and the moon is hidden. The shrubs dance and creak. As I stand listening and sniffing the air for clues in the front door frame, the bathroom door slams and my office curtains wave. It could go either way, but the ground is thirsty.

Suddenly dragonflies, but only memories of mosquitos

This late season; July and the elders are flowering, the apple June drops litter the lawn and, for the first time, this week, dragonflies. The dragons fly carefully, colours still pastel, exoskeletons still soft. The dazzling, swift insectivores of summer still infants.

The lawn, an underbrush of soft green blades, a fluffy top of hawkweed yellow and plantain, got trimmed yesterday. Potted plants that cower in the shade of apple trees moved out and back; wooden frameworks did the same dance, but rolled rather than slid their journeys.

The summer's bills have arrived. Insurances, MOTs, the winter's fuel. Children move-on steps (only small ones), all relaxed into more teenageness. Holiday plans form.

Small birds have fledged and seek independence. Foals still lounge in shade when they can get away with it, but are learning to like the grass. Three donkeys in the village don't appear to have foals this year. In the early morning a month back I mistook them for a pile of grey rubbish sacks stacked in the gutter; their ears up like tied bag tops while they rested their legs in communal half-slumber.

The white clematis growing almost through the peanut feeder has given some rarer visitors heart. Last Friday a low stock of nuts brought an uneasy truce between a mouse and sparrow. Both nibbled their own side of the stack carefully. I disturbed a woodpecker on the Sunday morning. He flew to the apple trees leaving the feeder swinging wildly in his wake.

I walked the tracks of Ocknell Plain, stalking deer, bending to sniff the browsed thyme, photographing the common spotted orchid. Over towards the old cloverleaves, where 70 years ago Merlins hummed and fired, I looked for my campsite - in my mind it was yesterday and the peg holes should still have been sharp and the grass yellowed in a rectangle, but in reality, 29 years have passed. I couldn't find the spot, now probably scrubbed over. What's left of the runway doesn't look so impervious to tent pegs as I remember; more monuments have softened, collapsed - dug out by fox and rabbit, their camouflage complete.

Heart strings

Trees leaf. Oaks unfurl and gently reinforce their defences with tannins. The hornbeams have reached opacity. Horse-chestnuts have become unlikely candelabra just as apples are beginning to drop their pale pink confetti.

On the lush lawns yearlings are leaving foalhood as they started it, nuzzling their mares milky teats. The new crop is near to dropping, all legs and fluff soon.

I picked my mandolin this morning, second time in three weeks? Breakfast's sugar shock shaking my strumming arm, missing strokes; fret fingers too soft; remembered chords with no rhythm

litters

After two days warm, in the sun, the journey on Tuesday morning was on drying roads. Under the melding deciduous canopy the road held fine vernal litter. Brown stipules under the beeches, green male flowers under the maple and the microscopic allergenic dust (for those who suffer hay) sprinkled the ground, adding to the colour pallette growing richer with the season.

I saw the first foal, a Shetland, Wednesday; in the sunshine before the day cooled and softened into a hazy, sleepy evening.

Yesterday broke bright and sunny, but the demoralising predictions of the weather folk came to fruition and, though sun and blue pushed past my window into mid morning, they were driving on the edge of stormy weather that occasionally dominated, to soak and wash the fresh spring colours clean again. Herds of herbivorous mammals on the lawns and heaths were having their hair gently ruffled on my morning drive. The evening was accompanied by angry rattling of things not tied down, the flapping of sacks, the hiss of airborne particles blasting glass.

Stiller this morning, clouded, damp. I foolishly woke for the start of the morning chorus; territorial shouts, avian wolf whistles and calls to arms.

First cut (2013)

It was a 9 boxer, but a bit brutal, a bit functional. No edges, just the centre; all the posts and trees still wear their cuffs. Unfortunately I met a frog on the way, but it wasn't one of those embarrassing encounters where you just disable a leg and have to watch them hop in circles because you are too squeamish to finish the job properly, no. It was a proper brain pate event.

It was only a week ago on Friday that I noticed the leaves breaking on the apple trees. That weekend there was a peacock butterfly and a comma. Monday I saw that the custard maple was flowering. Pink cherry opened cheekily last week, to drop and carpet the floor before a light shower on Friday that swept up all the petals to piles.

Some camellias have bloomed patchily this year, looking as though the frost scorched their buds at the wrong time. The tulip flowered magnolias though seem unscathed and are bright beacons in gardens everywhere.
I passed a ditch this morning, lined now with slowly baking green slime. whether due to drainage or the last three dry weeks I don't know, but I seem to remember water in that ditch for a year - since it began to rain last April.

I snook a morning away from my desk and went to almost paddle by the sea. Wearing a jumper, but feeling warm in shelter, I sat a few minutes and groomed beach gravel; just long enough to find a fossil tooth. The folk there were all cheery; happy to share the sun and a few words each according to their need for solitude and the sea. I could have stayed, but I had the wrong sandals and nothing to drink and the usual lingering guilt.

Dancing

As I drove the pothole polka across the village, a flurry of fluffed ice crystals danced out of the slipstream of the car in front, looking like nothing in the cold dry morning so much as the fall-out of a high altitude pillow altercation.

I was reflecting on Monday, as I drove past the Spring gently freezing into sparkling rims round the still puddles, how fortunate we are here. Too Easterly for the South Western snow; too Westerly for the South Eastern. Too far South to enjoy the Northern snow now coating Cumbria and drawing, like a damp unwelcome blanket, as far as the knees of Basingstoke at the weekend. Not, in the bitter wind that has chivvied us back in the door after a single lap of the lunchtime building, in the Goldilocks Zone, by any (except the fevered physicist's) stretch of the imagination, but better off than most.

The distant, pink camellia is showing opening buds down the garden, joining the red in the front now showing its colour all around, not just against the single-glazed window pane's microclimate. Under the busy bird feeder clematis is climbing and blackbirds are building again in the garage ivy.

In the dusk, setting

My neighbour's security light flicks into action at every passing car, themselves shining eye-scorching beams East, but even so, fail to prevent this morning's pony theft of rubbish bags.

At 19:10, bare feet slowly losing heat to the gravelly driveway, just above the nearby chimney, West; C/2011 L4 Pan-Starrs I salute you, and also use my left hand to steady binoculars.

A corner turned

Glowing white stems and a purple haze coating their terminal branches; these trees look more like Factory produce than young stands of sibling saplings self seeded across the heaths. Alien in the springing morning light beams cast by our orange star, partially occluded by cloud banks and the edge of the Earth. The silver birch, still remembering the gold pennies of their cast off clothing already dream of the coming solar energy boom, wriggling toes deeper into loam. Photosynthesising gowns still locked against the worst of winter; ice and the weather's wind tsunamis driven by alternate vortices, Siberian and Saharan blasts, oceanic and continental.