Friday 22 August 2014

Increasingly autumn...

Increasingly I’m catching that autumn vibe. The mornings are cooler, the air cold with damp, and the sunshine somehow seems to be a slightly paler yellow. Autumn comes early methinks as the fruits in the hedgerow tumble into luscious juiciness and the mushrooms pop up in the fields.

I hear the cawing of crows in the mornings and the gentle thrum of cold rain upon the roof. The light changes quickly across the mountains. Dark clouds breaking into slabs of sunshine on the distant fields and sea. A glowing arena of illumination one moment, a few sliced rays of light the next. If you aren’t quick you’ll miss it.

Harvest time is here. Do schools still have Harvest Festival services I wonder? I doubt it, so many things have changed. Not everything though, we still have a semblance of the seasons even it they appear to happen at slightly the wrong time. I noticed a spider’s web on the gate all covered in watery diamonds, and even a brown leaf or two fluttering down the lane the other morning.

Yes, I think that old autumn is on his way, softly, softly, stealing away our summer, and he didn’t even have the decency to wait for September to begin.

Let's hope that he's as glorious as our summer has been.

4 comments:

  1. Liz Shore on FB
    Beautiful, you've made me yearn for cooler, darker and cosier days!

    Schools do still have Harvest Festival. It's usually at the end of October when the kids are already half-full with Christmas!

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    1. Andrew Height Thanks Liz. I remember the Harvest Festivals when I was a kid. The bakers of the town baked loaves shaped like sheaves of wheat for their children,the gardeners provided their kids with carrots and potatoes, the butchers offspring hung chickens and sides of ham in the school hall... It made my can of beans look pretty silly.

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    2. Liz Shore on FB
      You still get the range now but it's mostly pushy mums with big fruit hampers at one end and Supernoodles at the other. No Harvest Festival display is complete without a can of beans!

      The songs are the same as I sang 30 years ago and any song that mentions 'jet planes meeting in the air to be re-fuelled' had been around a while then!!

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    3. Andrew Height
      The first time I saw spaghetti that wasn't in a tin in tomato sauce, but in a packet was at the school Harvest Festival. I remember thinking that it couldn't be the real stuff.

      Tim's dad was the publican at the Nag's Head and always sent a bottle of scotch. Adam's mum made wine and always sent three bottles of her parsnip. I bet they didn't make it into the OAP hampers.

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