Saturday 29 October 2011

Favourite Season

Autumn is definitely here. The leaves are turned to incredible variety of colour, many one unique to that plant, so you could just show me dogwood or spindle, say, just the colour, and I'd have a good chance of guessing it. Anywhere near woods there's an indefinable scent of rotting, but not at all unpleasant. Summer birds have nearly all left and the first winter ones are coming in.

Autumn's my favourite season. I think ultimately it's not the colours of the leaves or the snese of completion, of fruiting, but the sense of change, the urgency of arriving winter thrushes and geese, the hint of winter. For two and a half years I was outside this, more completely than you can be if you never leave a city, because I was just about on the equator, in Kenya. There were rainly seasons and dry, but I missed the temperate seasons. It helped me to realise how deeply embedded they are in the culture of people from temperate or actic zones.

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