The papers have been reporting that there has been only two hours of sun in the last two weeks across the UK. I have just accepted it as the changing of the seasons but today there is sunshine, but also a cold wind like a harbinger for the long winter ahead. I think back to how I had to order a fresh load of wood in the last week of April days before the traditional celebration of the start of summer. We all couldn’t believe how cold it was.
Why do some trees shed their leaves quicker than others? At Maytree House the ash at the entrance is totally bare while the young oak behind it is still completely full and filters the sun through its green and orange coat.
I went to hear John Lewis-Stempel give a talk recently in Taunton about his new book ‘England, A Natural History’. He said a funny thing, that the only thing that smells good when it is dying is leaf litter. And he’s right. It has a lovely fermenting sweetness like apples.
The old grass tennis court on the way to Windmill Cottage has abeen mowed but the net has gone. Perhaps it has finally taken retirement from its many years of hosting summer games. It’s where my grandfather used to play in the 1950s. My mum can remember him going off to play in white trousers and she could hear them playing through the trees on summer evenings after she’d gone to bed. I remember the white Slazenger balls still in their cardboard boxes when I used to explore the larder at Rose Cottage as a boy.
The top field is now ploughed and flattened. There are many stones resting in the earth. I remember Jane saying how these two fields aren’t the best for growing. Ronnie Blythe in ‘Akenfield’ wrote how before the war villagers in Suffolk would be paid to go and collect the stones off the fields. The trees that line the field are releasing leaves in a constant stream. They float down around me softly in the same manner as snow flakes and rest on the grass border that Henry – kindly – likes to leave on the edge of all his fields. It creates patches of camouflaged grass. Later in bed I read Ronnie’s ‘Next to Nature’, published for his hundredth birthday only months before he died. He writes this about leaves in November:
‘How golden bright it is outside where the lime leaves fall in their millions – well countlessly anyway..The air will be delicious, a kind of dying freshness whuich is full of movement and colour.’
An anxious looking woman appears with a very excited dog with a tennis ball in its mouth. It is a bouncing, brown mass of whiskery happiness. In stark contrast she is fretting. ‘No. No. Don’t do that. Come here. No. Come on. No. Sorry. Sorry,’ as she reaches down to grab its collar. I tell her not to worry.
I meet lots of people like this. Not in total control of their dogs and often seemingly anxious about people’s response to them. Many people I now see will stop as soon as they see me and put their dog on a lead til they are past me. I don’t know if it says something about the dogs, the owners or how people without dogs may respond to them. A lot of people would blame it – like many other things – on the ‘pandemic’.
Often there are Lynx helicopters here from Yeovilton airbase that buzz and whir overhead here doing their exercises but thankfully today it is quiet. As I look across the moors in the Isle Valley towards Isle Brewers and the Blackdown Hills beyond there is only the recycling lorry slowly trundling up Holman’s Way with only the top foot of it visible above the hedgerows declaring its message:
‘Most people in Somerset recycle. Do you?’
The Slow Walker 