To Autumn
Words from my walk along the River Itchen
This is a thank-you letter of sorts to the kingfisher, cows, sheep, and swans who share their stretch of the River Itchen with me. We’ve been enjoying the most perfect September days, with bright sunshine and cool air. The sunshine is such an intensified, ultra-golden version of itself it’s like a lighting effect on a film set. I had a pair of sunglasses a while back that had a warm pinky-gold tinge to them that made everything look amazing: actual rose-tinted glasses. Autumn sunshine does it all on its own. Everything looks its best. Oh, and that refreshing autumn air swishing around your limbs; walking through it feels like swimming in a cool outdoor pool.
It’s this autumn feeling I crave so badly on the sticky-hot days of summer, which if you’re a heat melter like me, leave you feeling lethargic, stressed, even panicked. Or on those days, like at the end of July this year, that brought almost biblical levels of rain, ‘the heaviest rain I’ve ever seen’, which didn’t even really seem good for the garden or for ducks. Although, I did see a pigeon taking a shower, which made up for it. I’ll share the video at the end of this post.
Sunrises and sunsets this week have been wow-factor pink; bookends of the day making peace over the olde weather wisdom of ‘warning’ and ‘delight’. I’ve felt lucky to be able to go with the flow of the season and get out into the sunshine early in the day, saving my desk work for when the light floods into the studio in the afternoon/evening. A perk of freelancing in this field is that I got to discover (or confirm would be the more accurate word) what time of day I most like to work, and to go with the flow of that.
[Some sort of klaxon should go off right now, as I’ve fallen into the trap of posting on the internet about ‘the best time to work when you work for yourself’; there are about a billion blogs on the subject, and everyone loves to tell you about their best hacks for the ultimate daily routine. But it’s just not fun to read is it? Unless it’s also your favoured routine, and then that gives that feeling of ‘yes! that’s me!’. This happened at a conference I went to this week; I was chatting to someone who had the exact same ‘favourite time to work’ preferences as me, and with it the same challenges: energy coming at a time when those around us are winding down.]
My perfect hours are right in the most unpopular time of day, between twelve and eight, with my absolute favourite, doing-my-best work time being late afternoon/early evening, between four and seven — absolute gold for creativity and energy but extremely awkward for things like needing to make dinner. I’ve never been a lark or an owl; I’m very much a middle-of-the-day person, which, someone told me a while back, makes me a ‘pigeon’. Hmm ... two pigeon mentions in this post already; a high number for someone who does not generally go about life talking about pigeons.
Okay, where was I before all of this talk of working hours? Yes: going on autumn walks. One of the walks I take is a loop through Winchester’s water meadows, past our beautiful local almshouse the Hospital of St Cross, and along the river to St Catherine’s Hill.
Unlike the fast-flowing weirs nearer the centre of Winchester, where the ducks swim upstream to the ‘top’ so they can then let go and freewheel all the way back down, the river here seems almost still. It’s tree-lined on one side, with fields on the other, and the shape of the bank creates natural vistas where there’s a clear view along to watch the kingfisher as it speeds by in that flash of blue. One Friday this time last year, just before (or after?) I took this photo, I saw the kingfisher twice and heard it whistle as it flew.
This vivid scene is part of the landscape that the romantic poet John Keats walked in each day when he was staying in Winchester as summer turned to autumn in 1819. Inspired by his visit, he wrote his famous ‘To Autumn’ poem on 19 September that same year. The views can’t have changed all that much since Keats was here. Although his daily walk, at least as it is captured in the poem, was in the evening. So possibly he wouldn’t have seen a kingfisher. And almost certainly he wouldn’t have brought along, as I had done, a thermos of coffee and a peanut butter and blackcurrant jam bagel. He may, however, have collected ‘a horn of beer and a morsel of bread’ aka ‘the Wayfarer's Dole’, which the Hospital of St Cross has been bestowing on passing visitors since the year 1132! Last month, on a Hampshire Business Netwalking walk, one of the brothers invited us in to collect our dole. It felt really special to be part of such a longstanding tradition.
You can read ‘To Autumn’ (which is actually more about summer) via the brilliant Poetry Foundation website, and I recommend their poem guide that goes alongside; in fact, I recommend that over and above the poem itself. Here’s a snippet from it:
‘No matter how far we are from our school days, fall retains the air of fresh beginnings. And most of us are even further from our agricultural roots, making the weather a superficial consideration. It’s jacket time, and the streetlights snap on earlier.’ – Caitlin Kimball, writing in 2010 at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69595/john-keats-to-autumn
It’s Kimball’s, not Keats’s, words that are most poignant right now with the sharpness of climate change. The weather being a superficial consideration, one that humans can, and have been, ignoring, is a scary and uncomfortable truth. I try to stay close to my own agricultural roots, but invariably when life is busy and the days get colder and shorter, it can be a challenge to. Autumn feels a good time to renew personal promises to live sustainably and in tune with the natural world – to thank the year so far, to set things up well for winter, and most of all to appreciate the present: it’s what we’re at risk of losing.
… there’s really no smooth way into the pigeon video now is there? But, I’ll keep my pigeon promise and share it with you. A blurry pigeon-grey film. On watching again, the clip makes it seem like the pidge has a troublesome wing, but I can assure you that it was simply washing very thoroughly, and after doing both underarms, it happily flew away as if it had had the most glorious spa day.