Dog scampers through reds
Autumns' crisp leaves are falling
The ground senses change
Long whiskery nose
Excited by strong fox smells
Darts into a bush
Reappears crunching
Old dried bones delicious snack
Low sun glows weakly
Through the trees faint gold
Swish swish the close of summer
Happy dog, bones gone
There has been a fair amount of time spent in churches of late not for all the happiest of reasons either, but those stories are for another time.
There is something about being in the church which makes it quite hard (for me) to be there being serious and contemplative, and it’s to do with a particular word which tends to come up a lot, because it is church after-all, and the word is Christ. I can’t hear the word now without my brain flicking immediately to a very particular character from a very particular BBC drama. (I wonder if anyone will know where my brain goes when hearing that word before I get to the end of this daft ditty, when I shall tell you.)
But it means if I am sitting in quiet contemplation under the roof of the church and a vicar starts wanging on about Christ, it’s hard to continue concentrating on the job at hand, without a small immature chuckle and a wondering of the mind.
Then when my usually quite empty brain starts moving in this auto-word-association manner, I am launched back in time to prep-school where I was taught science by a man called Alan.
Poor Alan. He didn’t stand a chance against us awful south England uppity children. Alan was from Up North and he had a ginger beard and tight belly squished snugly into what can only be described as golfers-jumpers. We used to laugh at him constantly. He would stand at the front of the class aggressively scratching his ginger beard (don’t get me wrong, many of the absolute best people have red hair, my first ever kiss was in a graveyard with a scrumptious chap with light strawberry-blond hair and a face of freckles).
But we were also quite frightened by Alan, he had a powerful shout and a scorching scowl and we didn’t always understand what he was saying, which grants a bit of authority (because even bratty 10 year olds can’t constantly say what/pardon/excuse me? to find out how to light a bunsen burner via an alien dialect without beginning to feel stupid).
Oh how he disliked us. Going into his science lab was never easy – it smelt strongly of vinegar and he would make us cut up red cabbages to see what colours they were made from by soaking them onto blotting paper. Possibly the most interesting class we had was when he prepared us for the appearance of Hayleys Comet – a once in a 75-year chance - it was very exciting; we didn’t see the comet though as we all had to be in our chilly metal framed beds when it passed over school. (I’ll be 85 when it next passes through our sky, so either dead or on another metal framed bed in a different sort of institution...)
Because we were a fairly foul bunch of kids we gave him the nickname Fungi. And we would howl with laughter thinking about Fungi and draw cartoons of giant red and white spotty toadstools in his class, right under his angular nose. There’s no way he couldn’t have seen them and wonder at the provenance of this name. I suspect it was as basic as the fungi being red and livid looking.
He once got so angry with us (proving to us that red heads really are angrier people) that he shouted loudly over our heads: DON’T BE SO FACETIOUS! And the way he spat out the word facetious has never, ever left me. So when I am having little moments in church tripping over the word Christ and having a chuckle, my thoughts bring me back to that vinegary classroom and Alan yelling (dangly thing in his throat waggling manically) full throttle in his northern accent (proving to us that Northerners really are angrier people); he really lost his shit.
To give him his due, he got us – well, me, at least – back in spades, by showing us the terrifying film Poltergeist a few weeks later one weekend (I believe it was an 18-cert. We were 10.).
I didn’t sleep in my grim metal framed bed for many months after that, in the certain knowledge I'd be taken from my bed by a posessed tree.
(Did you guess? It’s Alison Steadman as Pam in Gavin and Stacey “OH MY CHRIST MICHAEL”, clutching her cheeks with both hands. If you’re called Christ, or Michael for that matter, I’m afraid I can’t take you seriously anymore. Word associations, it appears, stick for a very very long time.)
Oh no! It's The Change!
And there go the flowers... The gladioli are listing to one side like a tall yacht mast in a storm; roses which got caught unopened in the downpours last week are now melting into brown balls of sad unfolded petals; and the leaves on the trees have started very quietly to turn, the bold beech greens losing out to a murkier pond-like hew. As though if they do it without making too much noise we won't notice and kick up a stink. Shhh. Don't tell them it's time.
Another sign of The Change is the bantams are moulting. There are feathers all over the garden. The cockerel, Buttercup, in particular looks pathetically scrawny, he struts around the garden a bit embarrassed by his feathery discord but trying to remain handsome for his lady-friends who are looking quite healthy and shiny. It's like when you turn up to a party having misread the invite - everyone is in their spangly disco kit and you've come in your old gardening jeans covered in mud, held up with a piece of string. I feel for Buttercup. I know he knows he's in the wrong clothes. It is hard to hold your head up high and crow with confidence when you're in your underwear.
Meanwhile, and I don't tell the bantams this, yesterday I saw four dead pigeons, as though they had just given up on it all. They foresaw 6-months of rain, darkness, muddy footpaths, thunderous gun-fire ricochetting around the valley and just felt it was easier to drop dead out of the sky than stick out another endlessly wet winter.
The Weather is also Changing. It is representative at times of the natural world enacting the experience of a menopausal human woman. The inconsistency of the garden thermometer is a valid starting point. Hitting 18 degrees in the day, dropping to 4 overnight - the sweats to the shivers with the nonchalant rise and fall of the sun. The unpredictable moodiness of the winds - one moment blowing a gale, dropping with no warning to as still as a glassy lake. Trees falling down in rageful surrender as their drought ridden roots can no longer cope with the squalls, while in the boarders of a garden the vibrant dahlias are in full bloom laughing in their joyful mad colourful bursts of energy, firmly denying the pending loss of light and heat. The fields all ploughed and brown and lumpy and barren, yet here are the lawns as green as they have ever been this year, needing to be mown weekly by surprised gardeners. The restless sleeplessness at night - waking to the owls screeching and the mad moon shining in through the crack in a curtained window, the world can't sleep when it's going through The Change...
The mood swings, the highs the lows, the chaos - it's autumnal vibes alright, lunacy almost, contradictions, inconsistencies, fog, the cheeky laughing-at-you-all with the mystery we cannot control.
And talking of parties where you misread the invite, who the heck invited
all the spiders to the web-making-party across the doorway, so on the way out
to your confusing walk (jumper on, jumper off, jumper back on, no, off again,
sweating, frozen, sighing, swearing WTF) you have to get through 8 invisible webs
and just pray that the spider hasn't fallen into your hair enroute. I'll tell
you who invited them: the f'ing Weathopause (my new name for autumn), that's who.
Next issue: ranting country woman gets sucked into a muddy quagmire and finally there is peace in the valley.
