We had a hard frost last night, but this morning rose crisp and bright and I was squinting as I drove due west on my way to physio (of which more anon) in the early afternoon. Driving back, there was a bowl of molten honey in my mirror and huge banks of fuchsia clouds on the horizon. Convention has it that from late autumn into winter we are gradually descending in to darkness and gloom. “The nights are fair drawing in…” but it seems to me that this is time of year when light takes centre stage, struts and twirls and shows its personality.
In the summer light is everywhere, a glowing backdrop, notable only by its absence; the sudden dislocating blindness of plunging into a leafy wood, stumbling until the eyes adjust. Now though, light is on manoeuvres, reclaiming a share of the darkling spaces. It began with bright leaves of maple, hazel and birch, decanting clear yellow down into the heart of the woods, then a blaze of beech and smouldering oak. As the leaves fell, brightness ran down soft grey and silver striped trunks, glistening off the slopes of glossy ivy and periwinkle to pool in the paths. Suddenly, far out from the track there is the brightness of the loch, and a flash of swans gleaming through jagged tangles of bramble stems and bleached stands of thistles and willow herb. In the evening light there is a delicate equipoise, the slanting rays dragging ever lengthening shadows out to dance over the fields.
It is a veritable wonder and, notwithstanding the general throbbing in the leg department, walking with Lyra is an absolute joy. I am therefore shamelessly including yet more tree pictures from my copious stores.
Everyone and everything seems to be out and about, enjoying the season. Curious fungi has begun to sprout everywhere (apart from on our dedicated mushroom log naturally). A couple of weeks ago there were otters on the Hirsel loch, playing in amongst the swans. Yesterday, a snap frost had frozen much of the surface and we were greeted by a positive commotion of ducks jockeying for position in one of the few free flowing currents. On Monday Mum and I took the riverside walk (which proved rather overambitious in the leg department) and watched an exasperated mother heron repeatedly interrupted in her fishing by her three chicks, hell bent on escaping the shelter of an overhanging branch to go adventuring. Egrets also seem to be everywhere, two pairs in the thinning brush by the rivers edge at Norham and more down by the fishing beats in Coldstream. They seem to live amiably with herons and can often be found side by side on the riverbank, the egrets dibbling and dabbling and nodding their little heads, gentille little gossips, with the herons listening intently, grave and still. Lyra has had pheasants aplenty to chase, plunging headlong down leafy tracks and revelling in the rusty squalking as they lumber over the hedge to escape. I think she goes by sound more than scent, as several times there have been does daintily crossing over the path, and once a nervous vole peering up under a pile of leaves, and she has calmly passed on, untroubled.
