On August.

It seems to me that summer gets shorter every year. It feels like only a week since I was looking for the first swallow to appear, yet today I was wishing them well as they hunted to garner reserves for the long flight home. It’s only a few days since I talked about the plumping green elderberries, but today I saw that some of them are already turning black. And the leaves on ash and oak, beech and sycamore, willow and aspen are drying and hissing in the cool breeze.

Next stop autumn. Autumn: season of falling light, lengthening shadows, chilling air and a landscape clothed in the colours of death and decay. I’m a spring and summer man to the core. However much I recognise that the system requires things to decay, die and be reborn as something else, I still can’t help questioning why I should have to go along with it against my will. If humans can invent a pause button, why can’t nature? And on a more intensely personal level, I need the energy of growth to give me life. Without it there’s a part of me that wilts with the falling leaves.