Beginning

It's probably the autumnal weather that has prompted me to write here again after so long. That and the fact that there are at least two other things that I should be writing which are both important and urgent.

A lot has happened since May 2012 - I finished one course and then started and finished another, I moved to Swindon and Syd the cat retired to the seaside, where he is indulged with frequent meals and near-constant company. 

I had a three hour coach journey yesterday and saw gigantic tractors harvesting crops in the dark. This end of summer the days are shortening and it's getting cold. I had an enormous book with me but ended up listening to the reassuring voice of Donald Macleod telling me about Handel and looking out of the window. After it was dark I started listening to A Brief History of Being Cold, which is one of my favourite things ever - if it was a book I'd keep it by my bed in the emergency/insomnia pile. One to listen to again, in the deep winter.

The job I moved for will end soon (as anticipated) and new plans are underway. There are jumpers in the shops again, proper ones, in dark colours and made of wool, and there are enormous blackberries in the hedge by the path to where the bats are. A good time to begin.

Seasonal poetry

Poetry is one of my big cultural gaps.  Although there are poems I can recite from memory, they tend to be of the rhyming and amusing variety.  (If we ever meet and conversation flags, you can test me on Matilda, Who told Lies and was Burned to Death by Hilaire Belloc.)  It's probably that it's mainly a bit much for me - I have a particular aversion to anything poignant, which pretty much writes off a great deal of all art, and particularly poetry.  When I think about changing seasons, though, I do think of Frost at Midnight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 

I have tried to learn copperplate calligraphy, which is as pesky to do as it is lovely to look at.  One of my efforts was to write out the last section of this beautiful poem, which Coleridge wrote for his son, Hartley, in which he describes how Hartley's rural upbringing will make him a child of nature, and influence his imagination:

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

Frost at Midnight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Richard Holmes, who wrote one of my favourite books, The Age of Wonder, wrote a two-part biography of Coleridge.  It is very sad, but incredibly interesting and very moving.  I recommend it heartily.