First Brush of Autumn

September! Oh hurrah September is here! I no longer have to pretend that I'm fine swishing along in summer clothes and pinchy sandals, or that I'm not sweating through my very scalp, or that no really, I'm fine here in the scorching heat and not at all worrying about my pale northern skin. 

 I'm such an autumn lover that the minute September 1st hit, out came the thick black tights, the off-key librarian wardrobe and the proper duvet, the one that's so heavy I feel like I'm being held in a cuddle all night long. It. Is. Bliss.

Mornings, as I pelt along the pavements to my morning swim, there is a slight chill to the air, the brush of a lower temperature that prompts me to look out my jumpers. The skies are dark by 8.30, cobwebs are dew-bedecked like diamante necklaces and there is the faintest whiff of mist and earthy goodness in the air. 

Bonfires are still banned where we live, especially on the allotments, so there's no hint of that lovely smoke you get from one but the hedgerow along the canal towpath smells of leaves gently decaying. There's already a thin crisp layer under some trees that I kick my way through, and the conkers have started to burst open. 

Last night I went damson picking with a couple of friends of mine. These gloriously purple-blue coloured (it's a colour I'd quite like to wear!) fruits have been dangling, unnoticed, from branches for a few weeks now. After an hour we had a crateful, as well as stained purple fingers. Our sleeves and necklines were wet from the dripping trees and the occasional badly fumbled branch that would slip through fingers and fling itself skywards, showering us with cold water.

Would you believe this is the first time I've ever eaten a damson raw? For the last 44 years of my life, I thought they had to be eaten cooked. Well they don't: these were so ripe and ready to eat, they were little flavour bombs in our mouths, sweet and like a concentrated plum. I arrived back at home with my own bagful, a tiny jar of last year's damson jelly (good with cold meats, like cranberry sauce, as well as on toast) and muddy shoes. 

 Did you know that damsons were deliberately planted in hedgerows and wild spaces for housewives to pick, and they were referred to as "rent money" because they gave these women a chance to contribute some much needed money to the family income? I love finding out little nuggets of normal (i.e. not landed gentry or royalty) working history and my friend is a great source of them.

What is it about picking fruit that makes me feel like a child again? It's probably because we did it every summer when I was growing up as it was, then, the cheapest way to buy fruit. Strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries and blackberries by the boxful, mouths (because we ate almsot as much as we picked) and fingers stained. Knees marked by the straw beds we've been kneeling on, and arms scratched by brambles.

Now when I do it, I'm 9 again, a quiet child but not yet riddled with the crippling adolescent embarrasment and fear of looking weird that came later. As the Boyfriend picks leaves out of my hair, I no longer care if I look weird. I'm just picturing the weekend ahead: damson jelly, cakes and gin. The house will smell of sugar and fruit. And all will feel fine with the world.

I may even go so far as to try to make damson wine: "good damson wine is, perhaps, the nearest approach to good port that we have in England. No currant wine can equal it."

Not Standing Still

According to my calculations, we are now 7 weeks into the lockdown and I'm back in the office 3 days a week, overseeing (from a responsible distance) some essential repairs and not-so-essential decorating at the museum. Once we are able to reopen, we'll be ready for the hordes of people topping up their culture levels.

Once in, my time is split between a deep clean of the collection (yay cleaning, I have said never) and painting the shop area. My painting talents lie in getting the paint on the walls fast and getting it all over myself at the same time. Hair, glasses, nose, clothes, feet and most definitely hands are spackled and spattered liberally within just an hour. 

I've cycled in every morning, legs and knees making very loud complaints about all this exercise so early in the morning. Last Thursday, after a cocktail-based WhatsApp gathering of friends last night, they complained even more loudly than before, while the wind threatened to blow me back to yesterday. But the roads are blissfully free of traffic and it feels like a different world.

That different world is sometimes scary. Walking through empty streets feels a little 28 Days Later and voices echoing suddenly from an alleyway make me jump.

Walking along the towpath, the smell of cow parsley, lilac and hawthorn reminds me strongly of walks down country lanes with my Dad, tiny pudgy hand in his, little feet safely encased in Clarks shoes. Walks, in fact, that I repeated with my own child, 25 years later. 

Said child is now 21 and living in a nearby town with his boyfriend. When I messaged him on Monday, I received the following response "yeah, will do. Oh, and I'm in hospital lol". Lol? LOL?? Thank god it turned out to be to do with his kidneys rather than anything else, and he's home now, but still, that was a wobbly moment when I suddenly became very aware that, were the worst to happen, I wouldn't have hugged him for over 7 weeks. I'll stop now before I wibble again. 

Today is VE Day, 75 years since victory in Europe, which feels a little hollow given the rhetoric we were subjected to prior to the pandemic. Both my grandfathers had very different wars. The paternal one, a rear gunner, shot down over Italy, interred in a PoW camp (Stalag IVb) and forced on the long march by the Russians, hated it, refused to talk about it and would have retreated, were he alive today, to his greenhouse to think quietly among the tomatoes. The maternal one, posted to India, had a fine old time racing around on motorbikes, developing a taste for hot curries that never left him and charming anything female in a 5 mile radius. He would have loved today, bunting and medals out, high tea and saluting the flag with a glass of his shockingly bad homemade wine. I miss them both.

I was awake a little before 6 this morning, so retreated to the spare room, what I call my "woman cave". I've always been an early waker but slow riser, so a room to retreat to where I can read, practise Spanish, draw, daydream and idle away a couple of hours without bothering anyone, or shivering on the sofa downstairs is a bliss I never thought I'd get to have. By 7.30, I was bored of being inside, so headed to the allotment to check on the plants and give them the watering I'd been too tired to last night. 

Oh my, the wisteria on a neighbour's allotment is a sight (and smell) to behold. Draping itself decadently over their shed like a 1940s screen siren, its fragrance whispering husky nothings to your nostrils, it's another kind of wonderful. 

On my plot, no shed but the happy sight of 3 rows of potato tops looking furry and contented above ground. 3 of the 4 squash plants are happy enough but the 4th is pulling a massive teenage sulk and suffering from snails as a result. The courgette plant - of the 10 seeds I planted, only 1 germinated which was more than a little frustrating - has 6 blooms about to burst open. It looked exuberant in the early morning sun. 

I'll be back there later with wine and cake as the plot holders are all having an appropriately distanced VE Day celebration. My best 1950s frock will be on and I'll remember a blanket to sit on this time. There will be no digging for once.   

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go look at the irises in the garden, which are just starting to unfurl themselves. Whatever you find yourself doing this weekend, enjoy. 

This week, I'm...reading Dear Francesca, watching This Country, listening to Childish Gambino's 3.15.20. 

Highgating it outta there

For some reason, it was decided that the hottest day of August would be a perfect day to spend wandering around Highgate.

Actually, I know the reason why: we'd arrived in London the day before for a 40th birthday party and, as we were in the North London area, the Boyfriend was extremely thoughtful (despite the kind of hangover that makes you want to pull your own brains out and replace them with a cold cloth) and tagged on to the Sunday a trip to Highgate so I could fulfill a dream of many years standing.

The weather was not so thoughtful. There were no cool breezes, there was no smidgeon of rain to alleviate the suffocating heat. There was a veritable rush for the crypt in the cemetary just because it was several degrees cooler in the dark than it was outside. Frankly, I think we'd have rushed in if there had been zombie hordes awaiting us inside: fine, eat my brains, just let me lie down in the cool while you do it.

Actually I would not as zombies are my one irrational phobia. Although, having read Zora Neale Hurston's account of meeting an actual real zombie in Haiti (Tell My Horse), I'm not sure it is an irrational phobia.

But I can feel the question hovering behind the eyes of anyone reading this...why spend a gorgeous summer day in a cemetary?

I wish I knew the answer to that.

I suppose it's the mix of architecture, peace, surprising flashes of nature and social commentary that I love and that make graveyards, especially the big old Victorian ones, so appealing to me. Or it could be that, from a small age, a regular occupation when staying with my Nan was to go visit the small village cemetary where she would lay flowers for her father in law and own mother, reserving a little bit of spite for Doris, her unforgiving (her son married beneath himself when he took up with the baker's daughter) mother in law. Truly all life is contained in these places.

My sister and I "adopted" a small and neglected grave of a young girl, Rebecca, almost hidden in the corner by hedges. We pulled out the weeds, begged flowers from my Nan for the rusty pot and generally chattered about childish things to the tiny headstone. You could say that we were always morbid wee things, although my sister seems to have grown out of it these days.  

Anyway, enough memory lane. To the present day and Highgate. Gosh that place is beautiful. We paid our respects to Douglas Adams (it would have been rude not to leave a pen) and Karl Marx before heading to the west side and the guided tour. 

A confession: I am not much of a fan of the guided tour. There, I've said it out loud. That's despite having worked for a museum where the only way you could access the building was by guided tour (it was the exception to my own rule). I find that you have to stand for too long in one spot, that you don't get to see the bits that are most fascinating, that the chance to just sit, soak up the atmosphere and stare around you is missing.  

However, wandering on your own is distinctly not allowed in Highgate. According to a friend of mine who's PHD means she spends a lot of time wandering around cemeteries, and who has been allowed unescorted access to Highgate, there are quite a few holes in the ground, falling tree branches and other dangers which mean 1000s of people doing it is a health and safety red tape nightmare to be avoided. Much like the holes in the ground. So I can understand it, but knowing there are vast spaces I didn't see fires my curiosity. And I wish I'd been able to pay my respects to Lizzie Siddal.

And now, nearly a month on (another confession: I started this post a week after coming back but life has a way of getting in the way of my plans just recently), I imagine that the heat has dissipated and those huge trees, creators of so much of the H&S nightmare, will be starting to change colour. I'm trying to come up with a plausible reason for visiting North London again... I'd like to go back, do another tour, see more of the east side, not be viewing it all from the wrong side of a night out.

But is is my favourite cemetery? No, that space is reserved for Key Hill in Birmingham, an oddly isolated place where it suddenly grew silent around me (and a former colleague found evidence of a voodoo ceremony), and Haworth, not isolated at all, thanks to it's central location and the hordes of Bronte worshippers. But there is something quite special about Highgate nonetheless. I can understand why so many people have written about the place. Next on the bucket list of graveyards - the Pere Lachaise and Arnos Vale. Just not at the same time.