And forgive us our muttered platitudes,

As we forgive those that mutter platitudes to the wrong sky fairies,
(or the wrong platitudes to the right sky fairy).

My radio listening habits normally exclude any religious performances, as carefully as my televisual habits avoid soaps, but this morning I was caught out by the Christmas excess on Radio 4, and heard a blessing or two and what passes for the Lord's Prayer these days.

In my infancy, we were taught the Lord's Prayer, with the older words. We didn't understand all the words and we certainly didn't understand the full meaning. It passed for a mantra, some comforting words to be repeated while we could have otherwise been counting to 20. We came to realise that the local land-owners were not Christian, as they evidently had no intention of forgiving any trespassers; we perhaps learned that adults say things they can't explain, a God in three parts, and all the rest.

I am older now and much more cynical. The new words sound merely banal, but then I expect the entire service would have made the same impression.

I am an adult. I take responsibility for my own actions, I can construct a plausible explanation for the sum of time and chemistry producing intelligent life. There are enough mysteries, without believing in fairies. I cannot fathom the thoughts of friends and colleagues who profess religious belief.

Are you feeling lucky?

Once again, the fake Austrian fir tree has descended from the loft, been unpacked and erected. Still in the loft are the twin set of white lights that were bought at the same time as the tree. In the dining room are the coloured lights that were bought 4 years ago to replace the increasingly unreliable white lights.

The coloured lights live in the box with the tree, neatly folded and packed in their original packaging. sliding off the plastic sleeve causes them to spring out, to tumble and tangle a bit. Then, the annual question; are you feeling lucky? To test the lights before decorating the tree or not? This year - not. They worked anyway. It made my day.

jewels by night and day

The front hedge is covered with berries, red berries that glow particularly brightly in the car brake-lights as I park in the evening. The number of berries in the back garden is rapidly diminishing under the onslaught of red-wings. As usual these bullies have chased off the resident black-birds, but they seem happy to share the lawn with them. Last week There were red-wings, black-birds and song-thrushes all on the lawn at the same time, while great and blue-tits explored the trees, chaffinches chased overhead and a robin skulked by the garage. Under the cover of an apple tree trunk, a greater spotted woodpecker was opening the bark on a pruned branch asthough it was zipped.

A collared dove and, a little later, a pidgeon, were chased out of the ash tree, apparently by a black-bird. Maybe this bird was feeling the frustration of being excluded from the holly and the hawthorn and taking it out on something more timid still.

I saw a female blackbird try a rosehip, but she didn't seem very impressed. I expect the roses will carry their jeweled fruits for a while longer.

Getting lost

As a software engineer my work is occasionally immersive, involving, smothering, all-encompassing. Progress, progress at the rate demanded by timescales and complexity, forces me to hone my mind, to focus, to rebuild the conscious process into a machine that creates abstract phrases of algorithmic awe. The act of creation takes over the normal mental processes; emotion, humanity, are forced into the background. My personality is tempered into a brittle, multi-faceted glittering mechanism in which people can see their reflections from outside, but which they cannot penetrate, but get lost. The code, the data, the algorithms and their precise representations become my world. A fog descends over the real world and I cannot write except in strict syntax, my poetry is subsumed into stanzas of code; all parentheses and semi-colons. Only the brutal critique of the compiler and the patterned translation of the test cases can touch me. I fidget through the day, stabbing at keys and buttons, I whir in the night in place of sleep.

Creation. Let there be results.

autumn rushed

Autumn usually catches me in a regretful, but poetic mood. I normally wax lyrical about the colours, the heaps of leaves, the thinning of the canopy. Autumn came as a shock this year, since, having declared autumn just before half-term, we spent a week out of the country, and when we returned the leaves had turned. Instant autumn, and two weeks later, the majority of trees were near bare.

In the week after half-term I visited the custard maple to find that the lower leaves were about half turned to their characteristic yellow, the other half were fading from green still, the colour of spearmint leaves. The thinning crown was scattered with shades of oatmeal. Last week I sped past it blindly, only remembering when it was in the mirror, bare.

Beech and oak still cling, stubbornly, to leaves that are like a thin porridge. Other deciduous trees, like the birch, have gone into their winter sleep with just a few random remainders of their solar factories.

I walked out in the low sun of Sunday morning this week, across the green on a well built hoggin path that, although patchily wet, had not yet decided where the winter's puddles were going to form. The ditches held abandoned branches, pretending to be prehistoric monsters reaching up from the water, and mixed deciduous leaves the colour of dark chestnut. Across the lawn, ridges of collected leaves marked the extent of the streams' spate, now mostly returned between their banks. Drier pools of leaves were like crystalising fudge under their sleeping boughs.

Blog blocking

For half-term holiday, the family went sailing in Greece. This was to make up for the lamentable failure to get away in the summer, since, by the time I had ceased to be busy at work, the weather had gone into its characteristic August decline, sufficiently to discourage us from packing a tent in the car and heading West, as we had planned.

The sailing idea was a whim that came about when someone thrust a brochure into my hands at the Southampton boat show. We sail dinghies generally, when the weather encourages it, but had hardly set foot on a yacht, except on a couple of days this year. We checked the T&Cs with growing incredulity that, these people were willing to let just anyone sail their craft, qualifications and certifications be damned.

I have to pause the sailing tale here to give praise for the brochure. It was not the floatilla sailing brochure that immediately caught my eye, but the bare-boat one. A brochure written by people who like having fun on boats, no lawyers, no marketing. The pictures did a good part of the selling too; somewhere warm, quiet, relaxing, clean, friendly. All the good impressions came across. Very sensibly, although they allow just anyone to sail, these folk do not let them out on their own with 60+ grand's worth of sailable glass and epoxy. Bare-boat hire requires a deposit and some sailing qualifications (more than the RYA II we have).

Investigating the available options left us with the idea of a week at half-term, which is anyway the last week of the season. At this point we didn't stop to question that the holiday price was not inflated for half-term, thoughts from the brochure bouyed us along and those friends we spoke to, who were familiar with the area and climate, all suggested that the weather at this time of year was generally good, mid 20's celsius and warm sea.

I will admit, that before we left this country, we were aware of the likely weather conditions in the Ionian sea when we arrived in Greece. There had been mention of storms and temperatures rather closer to 20 than we had hoped for. But, we do sail, we do understand that it is weather dependent. We are quite familiar with arriving at the sailing club to find that the wind is too fierce, or that it has dropped entirely, or that, on an ostensibly beautiful sunny day, there is a threat of storms hanging bleakly over the needles and threatening to flatten all boats in its way. We were frustrated though, having got up very early on the Sunday and arrived shortly after mid day in good weather, to have to wait almost 48 hours before setting out anywhere.

I think I'll dive right in with  my central gripe here, everything else is peripheral. We understand weather, as I said, we undertand that the itinery is governed by what is possible in the worst conditions that can be construed from the forcast. What we did not understand is that the area is so crowded with floatillas, that finding a port that can contain one is like playing one of those 4 x 4 puzzle games in which there are 15 pieces all constrained to move in near synchrony. Not only were we constrained in our choice of destination, to ports considered safe in heavy weather, but also by everyone else in the sea, who were trying to do the same things. In fair weather of course, this situation does not arise; a full marina just means mooring round the bay and a longer row to the bar.

The immediate consequence of this was 46 hours in the harbour where we embarked, the corollary was that our first day in charge of anything longer than 16 feet on the water involved a journey that took 8 hours and involved rather more navigation than we had expected to undertake on our own. I must be fair and point out that we could have arrived much faster, but it being a sailing holiday, we took the approach of using the sails, which was probably mistaken, but is the solution, as dinghy sailors, that we naturally attempted. 20 miles (by the enthusiastic crow) or more, against the wind, was our first day and, on arrival, we were a bit emotional.

There, the tension is released,and now I can return to blogging calmly.

Three scrapes

I assumed, from gazing down my garden from the kitchen window this morning, that the overnight temperatures had avoided negative numbers. The last two days have presented window ice on the car and, on Wednesday, it was quite tough stuff, or perhaps my ice chipping muscles have atrophied over the summer. I was surprised then, when trying to wipe the water from my car before coming to work, to find that the water was ice. Fortunately it was more like soft sugar icing this morning and only required a vigorous rub.
With the sun out, and the weather dry, and a few spare minutes for the journey, I took the opportunity to pass the custard maple on my way today. I slowed down to get a good look into its canopy, to see if it was doing its usual seasonal colour change. I think this year that the lower leaves may turn to custard, but in the upper branches there are signs of marmalade streaking.
The maple route, the longer route to work, takes me along one of my favourite local driving roads, across the forest. As the bracken browns and curls and the deciduous leaves fall, the sight-lines on this road improve, making it safer to drive fast and with a little attitude. On a dry day the bends and climbs sweep together into a short symphony of motion. The road was clear of leaves and so it was only clouds of chaffinches that were swept up as I barrelled along, with a smile. A few squirrels played chicken, the ponies kept, largely, out of the way and the deer, if there were any, remained invisible. My usual route has been scattered with pheasant this week, and a lone quail has always been on the verge, but I saw none this morning.
The trees are still partly clothed, the colours not yet fully turned, and yet, already winter is creeping in. Northerly winds blow harshly from Arctic latitudes. Only the sun's elevation betrays the weather as autumnal, rather than the coldest season.