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.