Colour and light

Autumn is a season of mixed feelings for me.

I love warmth and sunshine and Autumn brings with it the promise of months of short days and gloom. For me that is a depressing prospect. The heating goes on, the windows have to be closed and, all in all, it feels like I’m shutting out the real world. Getting up in the morning is an effort – even with central heating, the room always feels cold in comparison to my warm bed – and stepping outside even more so as I’m wrapped up like Bibendum (usually known as The Michelin Man in the UK) just to go for a stroll. What’s more, all the bugs and illnesses start doing the rounds. As if being freezing cold for six months wasn’t bad enough, there is a prospect of being freezing cold and sick to consider. Yep – Autumn is like a portent of winter doom!

And yet, what a season! During the day, we still have sunshine and tolerable warmth and, because the nights are getting colder, the apples on my trees ripen and go a glorious red – and nothing beats an apple picked fresh from a tree. And as for the leaves… oh my word. Such a vast array of colours that are so beautiful it takes the breath away. The green remains but now we also have yellow, gold, pick, red, bronze… and somehow, whatever the tree combination, the colours complement one another perfectly. How does nature do that? What a fabulous, glorious time of year.

In the Bremmand Chronicles I’ve never managed to do justice to these wonderful colours. I mention them and, in the Autumn, there is a festival of Tree Dressing to mark the season but somehow, any words I can use a inadequate compared to natures amazing ability to settle down for the year in this blaze of glory. I will keep trying, though. You never know. I might manage to capture it somehow one of these days.