Mist, brimstone and hubris.

I stepped out into the Night Planted Orchard and was transported to my childhood. The moisture in the November air was congealing into a fine fog, heavy and textured. Behind it was a layer of woodsmoke from bonfires away in the village. Behind that there was the scent of brimstone carried from distant fireworks. An ancient memory warmed me, filling my nostrils with hot Bovril fumes twisting up from a warm mug. In my mouth I could feel the heavy suet dumplings smothered in thick  steaming lobby cooked for many hours. In my memory, the bonfire is a soaring, ravenous beast, close enough to twizzle eyebrows and make wet woollen coats steam. In my memory bangers and crackerjacks crackle at my feet. In my memory, bonfire night is a warm, intimate thing made of family and fire, warm clothes and hot food in defiance of the spirit of winter peering hungrily from the trees. It had a hint of menace to remind us that nature is a predator only partially tamed. In my memory the fireworks, are more soft than loud, like tiny bonfires, remembrances of fallen summer flowers. I love fire and I love fireworks, and these memories are why.

Today the bonfires are more distant. The air has the more modern scent of scorched sugar on heavy meats which struggle to push aside that faint hint of the past. The fireworks are managed and remote. They climb suspensefully into the sky and detonate like the start of war over doomed cities. Now it is a more distant thing, more strategic. The cluster of autumn festivals has changed. They all hark back to that resistance of coming winter, whatever people might say. Where Halloween and Remembrance Day were once sombre and reflective in their different ways, they are becoming more celebratory. In your face, you enemies of ours. In your face, evil spirits. In your face, Winter, your days are numbered. We no longer try to scare spirits from the garden at this time, instead we assault the world. We are the predator and the world lights bonfires to keep us at bay.

A curious state of affairs

Yesterday there was a full moon on the horizon, just as dawn broke, sitting on top of the long wall of the levees - not that we call them that here. Driving along, if I could have stopped, I could have placed any one of a dozen shapely bushes against its bright white face. Closer to work, stuck in traffic, the moon placed itself in perfect composition with a distant copse. By contrast, the previous morning, I had driven into the face of an angry sky. The clouds had been ripped into a crowd of small, black, ragged faces, all shouting down at the world. Behind the sky was changing from black to a strong but pale blue. Once, it occured to me, I would have described the colours in the sky in angry terms. Today I saw a grain of blues which reminded me of an old doorway, where layers of different blues had all worn away in runs and lines and blisters of paint. It called to mind, in the oddest way, a memory of a page in a school journal, with ink of one shade of blue fading, to be replaced suddenly by a richer, deeper, but different shade of blue, and a teachers words in blue biro against the margin. It called to mind the changing, rippling shades of blue on a boat in a remote fjiord as the sky faded, just as this one was coming to life.

Where did it come from, this shift in the source of words for colour.

January

A still day in mid January between two storms. It is the late afternoon and the sun is low. The trees have been brushed clean by rain and wind. They are illuminated by yellow light but by some trick of the day, it is the contrast which shines. Perhaps it's the dark clouds in layers on the northern horizon, grey and blue, with all shades of blue down to the horizon. The trees look like pen and ink drawings, every branch stark. Every building on the low hills rolling up to the clouds are outlinked in black ink against the glow. Not golden, not buttery, but yellow like a pale sun, or sere, or gentle the colour of fawns, which is no surprise. Every hedge is outlined and there, hiding low, there are some greens. Between the bands of clouds there are white clouds which are turning from the colour of wool scraps on a barbed wire fence, to textured warm yellows and tints of rose as the sun dies. At home we have watercolours, gifts from a relative, which capture exactly this.

Even in midwinter, England can be beautiful.