Autumn

My poor neglected blog. I’ve been swamped with work and avoiding the internet as it seems to exist in a different timeline; you drop in for a couple of minutes and two hours vanishes.
This weekend I cleared my desk for the first time in four weeks and got out into the garden. As if in reward Sunday was a beautiful crystalline Autumn day. The first serious overnight frost gave the air a lung scrubbing clarity. My lovely hydrangeas were singed but they’d been well warned. I’d told them they shouldn’t be putting out new buds in November, they needed to hunker down and get ready for winter.
The birds were hungry, even the dunnock was bolder than usual. Silly to get excited by an LBJ (little brown job) but they are so shy, they scuttle around in the bushes like little mice, which, I suppose, is how they earned their other name, the hedge sparrow.


The blackbird has long since stripped the rowan of all its berries and has now started on this shrub. I think it’s a cotoneaster but, as I didn’t plant it, I’m not sure. It has tiny pink flowers in early summer which the wasps and red bottomed bumble bees adored.

He has also been scrubbing around under the trees and collecting grass. I wonder if this is for a winter roost, he can’t be nest building.
I pottered around doing late autumn tidy up tasks, followed, as usual, by the robin. He is convinced that one day I am going to morph into a proper gardener and do some serious digging that will turn up the worms he loves. I stopped for a moment to look down the loch, breathing in lungfuls of the crisp clear air. The robin, impatient with my inactivity, flew into the weigela and started to sing. I’d never noticed his song before, only his “dik dik dik” alarm call when I put out the food, (which I always thought was a bit ungrateful, what’s alarming about someone feeding you?)
It was so unexpected and beautiful and quite melancholy, the essence of a frosty Autumn day.

It got cold very quickly once the sun went down. I came inside switched the radio on and they were discussing this poem by Edward Thomas:
Adlestrop

Yes. I remember Adlestrop---

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop---only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Different bird, different countryside, different season and a different time but it evokes beautifully the still moment when you stop and hear unexpected birdsong.