2026-08-28

After a summer of heat it is hard to imagine anything different.

Yet today, up at 6am for the baby, I felt the coolness of the morning air and felt the intimation of autumn.

Autumn, now, in theory, just days away feels like a different planet from the scorching heat day after day, the prolonged droughts that has brought Europe to a standstill.

It speaks of darkened mornings, mist in the valley, mornings where i may once again shiver to get out of bed, and where the thermostat may matter again.

For now, those are still intimations. September is usually a magical month where the heat has cooled but the sun still often shines and we bask in a respite before the grape harvest.

If we are lucky and the rain balances out it is a time of growth again, with the parched land returning to fullness in an indian summer.

I think now of the weight of places. Just returned from my natal shores and the places of my childhood and youth I see more clearly the charge of a place. The way it if freighted with memories, joy and hurt, peace and angst. I remember the paths I used to walk, the dogs, long since passed, who were my companions. In this wood, at this spot, i made a pact with my sadness. Here, amongst the grey and yellowed stone of the local market town, i spent my youth escaping school.

My memories there are of heavy autumn days or the bite of late winter as it thawed into spring. Rarely, and significantly, of summer. One image for some reason returns to me again and again (there must be many others if I were willing to wait and dig): I'm at school, but for some reason i fail to recall outside the limits of the town, amongst hedgerows in the midst of fall, half-alone and half-lost in a non-literal sense.

I have the gift and burden that I little liked childhood. Gift because my life watched from the present gets to seem in retrospect a tale of progress. Curse because such times are formative of us and it has left a residue of distrust and bitterness at the world, and especially at my fellow man (and I mean man).

Such is the weight and joy of time. We cannot outrun our memories, and yet our memories are not all of us, they are but a patina on the present, one, which as we practice, becomes thinner and thinner, until, perhaps, one day we slough it off completely and enter into pastures truly new.

What does always bring me joy, then and now, is to be in nature, to be amongst the grass and trees, beneath the great open sky, to reckon with an abundance of blackberries, or to be out on the farthest reaches of the farm alongside a great oak and feel, for a moment, the full silence, the sense of stillness and peace, to revel in the fact that however briefly i can see no sign of human habitation.