As October drifts to an end so we change our clocks – or not, depending in part on the clock. Clocks on computers change automatically, supposedly the car is linked to house Wi-Fi so should change with the computer but won’t, so will stay on French (or wherever) time until I can be bothered to burrow down through the options to do it manually, as I will with wall and mantel clocks, watches etc etc.. The Oven clock will take an hour with the handbook so will always be wrong
Me? I’m on cat feeding time which is linked to sunrise/sunset, so I’m all over the place…but everyone goes on how wonderful technology is in our machines, but they can’t even tell the time without manual programming, so what hope is there for organising the digitization of the NHS? I lean on the bedroom window cill and look down on the colours of the garden and think that whilst X is wonderful for free speech I must stop getting stuck in the abysmal school playground of the intellectually impoverished British political debate. As I look across the garden feeling the warmth of the sun I see soft drifting skeins of cobwebs floating serenely in the gentle breeze.
I wander downstairs, collect the camera, aware that what I am doing is finding prevarication again to avoid the studio for now, where hard decisions will need to be made, in favour of taking pleasure in collecting colour and absorbing scents as I tune my internal clock onto autumn nearly winter. I know I will have another mental conflict as a part of me want to go back to the simplicity of the flower paintings, but that is the 1970’s and we are in the conflict zone of the 2020’s where so many don’t see how close we are stumbling to civil war as our inept parliamentary bodies fail to adjust to modern times.
The cat joins me as I step onto the terrace with the camera. The buckets of rainwater garnered during October are themselves becoming cobweb draped. I filled the feeder yesterday and the usual gang of sparrows are bobbing and burbling, tweeting and tootling as they set about emptying them again. The cat likes to pretend he is moving independently but never seems far from my side. I amble around but also sit on the two benches in turn watching as shadows meander across the grass showing where unseen beasties, including butterflies, are flitting across the garden, no doubt dodging those same filigree floating webs I saw earlier.
The roses are still putting up new buds – much smaller, and the larger flowers are battered by the rain, leaving the beautifully formed new small flowers to carry the banner for colour and scent. Other flower spikes appear here and there and the grass is being coated in autumn leaves, but flowers that always appear this time of year are taking their place in the scheme of things. Missing are many berries on the holly, a countryman’s tale would suggest this means a mild winter, but doom mongers in the met office say the warm currents in the ocean are fading meaning it may be very cold. I have had enough of these gloom mongers though, they have been around since Nostradamus and always been wrong… although now we have government ministers who don’t have the ability to see through them to truth.
I sit with the cat, letting the sun and the beauty of growth and change soothe, for as I show in my paintings of the sea defences, even in the decay and death of the years there is beauty to be seen. I have written of how my walk to the studio becomes a prayer sometimes. Today it’s a hymn. So, stop – find some nature, and suck it up, baby. It will heal your soul.
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