Robins sing in a new season

The robins have appeared out of nowhere, singing their wistful, melancholy songs of autumn from hidden corners of the garden.  Summer’s only just got going but the signs of change are all around.

The bright pink balloons of phlox are beginning to fade, and the lavender is turning brown.   The evening primrose is nothing but straggly seedheads and even the heleniums are past their prime.

Helenium Moorheim Beauty catches the August sun

The buddleia is on its way out, after a summer entertaining butterflies – peacocks, tortoiseshells, red admirals and gatekeepers.   The beautiful bee-friendly allium sphaerocephalon has packed away its purple flowerheads for another year and only brown pollen-free shells are left.    The vibrant red splash that was crocosmia Lucifer has come and gone too.

Here be dragons: Crocosmia Lucifer provides a tropical splash

Now it’s the turn of rudbeckias and hibiscus to shine.  Japanese anemones are going strong too, flowering at head height in a corner with almost no light at all.  They’ve crept in under the fence and made themselves at home, thank you very much.   Gertrude Jekyll has a second flush of beautifully scented, exquisitely carved roses and the self-grown golden rod is in its prime.

Rudbeckias make a sunny splash in the autumn garden

For all its heralding of a season of harshness and decay, I love the autumn.  It’s a season of change, of the first chilly air on your face and of the grass heavy with dew in the morning.   Later the leaves will change into their autumn collection of colours too, but it’s the first subtle hints that I love.

We’re bidding farewell to one of the oddest summers ever: the wettest early part of the season since records began, a drought before that, and a stop-start August.  Who knows what kind of a winter the autumn is ushering in.  Maybe the robins’ song is partly a prayer to ward off the worst.

Summer memories: phlox, perovskia, allium, crocosmia, lavender and lots of lovely weeds

The one where something good happens after you’ve given up on it

I walked in the woods again this week, still green and lush and calming amid the storms of life.  For ages I sat on my favourite tree stump, hoping to see the deer come down to the water to drink.

It’s beneath the shade of an enormous beech tree, which sweeps its green canopy up into the sky and down into the valley, an omnidirectional sculpture of grace and beauty.   The stream beneath it has been stilled into a series of mill ponds, each not high enough to stretch over the stone dams and tumble on down to the hammerpond below.

The stilled stream reflects the canopy of trees above

There’s no wind.  The ferns and ivy and wildflowers – the flowers have long since faded to green – clothe the woodland floor.

Bluetits are chatting inanely about life, and a woodpecker knocks politely, somewhere unseen above.   Suddenly there’s a heavy crashing: the deer at last?   No – Just a clumsy squirrel, swinging through the branches like Tarzan, stopping to nibble hazelnuts before dancing  on its precarious way.

Finally the gentle spatter of rain persuades me it’s time to move on.   No deer today, dear.   I don’t mind at all.  Wildlife watching is as much about the hope as the experience.

The walk back is lovely: on up the hidden valley; across the stepping stones that separate the upper pond from the stream; up the steep bank and back past the Hansel and Gretel cottage.

I feel refreshed and so pleased that I overcame the apathy and went.  I’m a couple of hundred yards from the final steep climb back to the village when suddenly, almost immediately to my right, there’s a crashing sound. This time it’s unmistakeable.

Two deer: four big eyes, four big ears, two huge black noses.  Gingery bodies on impossibly spindly legs.  We look at each other for quite some time from no more than 20 yards apart.  Every few minutes one of us takes a few paces.  We look back again.  Eye contact, recognition of another living being.  To add to the magic, the sun makes its first appearance of the day.  As I walk away at last, one of the deer is silhouetted in the sunlight against the grass-filled field at the boundary of the woods.  We exchange one last look.

Back in the village, the world feels a sunnier place.  I exchange greetings with an elderly lady stopping to take off her cardigan in the sudden burst of heat.  We laugh about the vagaries of the weather.   I meet a neighbour and over his gate we share stories of our current struggles: I had no idea we were experiencing some of the same issues.

Transforming, uplifting, glorious.  If you go down to the woods today I can’t guarantee any big surprises, but I can pretty much promise you’ll come back feeling better than when you left.

London 2012: Prozac for the nation

If Nicole Kidman’s appearance in the play The Blue Room was pure theatrical Viagra*, then Jessica Ennis and her fellow Olympic stars are pure athletic Prozac.

Two weeks of vicarious sport, watching Lycra-clad lovelies running, jumping, cycling, swimming and generally looking fit in every sense of the word, have provided a great tonic for a nation groaning under the combined weight of a double-dip recession and the worst summer in recorded history.

Just for now, reality is suspended.  It’s as if there’s no downturn, no euro crisis, no unemployment.  The markets may be plummeting again but we don’t know and right now we don’t care.   Even truly horrific, significant stories like the massacre of Sikhs by an alleged neo-Nazi in the US are barely getting a mention on the TV news, as the media urges us forward on the trail of gold.

What’s particularly amazing about the Olympics is that the cynics have been completely won over.  Most Londoners didn’t want the Games in the first place: indeed many thought it would be an unmitigated disaster.  I was in the doom-mongers’ camp: after the Wembley stadium debacle of a few years ago I doubted whether we’d even have the venues built in time, and even if we did I thought anyone’s chances of arriving via the creaking transport system were low.   Well, we did finish the venues, the transport system has just about coped, and by international reckoning we’ve run a great Games so far.

Now, we can sit back on the sofa and watch a bunch of people giving their all for their sport.  They’re crying if they win, crying if they lose, crying if they don’t make the final, crying if they do.  This is the Princess Diana generation, all grown up and properly in touch with their emotions.

If the London 2012 Olympics have done nothing else, they’ve buried the British stiff upper lip once and for all.  And good riddance to it too, nasty damaging facial disfigurement that it was.

The athletes are, in effect, people who’ve completely lost their perspective.  They’ve gone for gold at great personal cost:  the years of getting up at dawn, the training beyond the point of pain and literally throwing up, the injuries, the long-term impact on their bodies, the sacrifice of normal fun and partying – the list goes on.  We don’t see that, the pain, the decisions in the dark places to carry on, away from the cameras and the glory train.  We just see the 5 seconds or 5 minutes or 5 hours of their event, and we see how much it means to them, win or lose.

Losing your perspective is generally seen as a bad thing, and generally it is.  Somehow with Olympic athletes it seems laudable.  They seem balanced, grounded, articulate and mostly thoroughly likeable people.  Maybe there’s a lesson there – that self-control and discipline make fine people?

The downside to all this, of course, is that for every athlete who reaches their golden goal, others tried and failed.   Some of them in their immediate post-race interviews – silver medallists among them – apologise to their friends, supporters and the nation for “letting them down”.  Gold was everything.  A lifetime’s dreaming, work and expectation, blown in a few minutes.  Yes that must hurt.

Even the winning athletes – and the nation with them – may yet slump into a massive post-Games anti-climax.  After all, these guys have focused on nothing else for years, some of them for their entire teenage and young adult lives.  It’s hard to see where you go from here if you’ve achieved incredible triumph, any more than if you failed to live up to your goals.

The nation too, once undistracted by heavenly bodies and sporting soap opera, will have to return to the realities of an austerity age.  Sadly the recession won’t have gone away when we collectively wake up from our Olympic dream.  The weather probably won’t have improved either.

But the legacy may just be that Generation X-Box gets off its collective backside and gets out there running, cycling, swimming, or any other of the host of activities we’ve seen on display.

I cycled faster to the station than ever before the day after Bradley Wiggins’ time trial victory; Saturday’s 10-mile bike ride before breakfast simply hadn’t ever happened before; and now, running through the woods, I can imagine (for at least the first 500 metres when reality kicks in), that I’m Jessica Ennis.

If that’s the micro-impact on me, here’s hoping that the nation’s children will be properly inspired to lose their perspective too.

*****

*This was Charles Spencer in the Telegraph, clearly a happy man after seeing Ms Kidman in the altogether.