Ah, it's the change.

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.