Season's End

Well, it looks like today will be the last real cycling day of the year, with the rest of the week set to be wet. Set out with a red sky behind me, and the harvest moon fading into the cloud coming up from the west. Better than yesterday's fog, where I chanced cycling — just as well, it turned out, because I could get past where a car had argued with a bus at the next nasty bend beyond where I wrote my car off at the end of Feb '04, by getting off and pushing.

It's been a hectic time the last couple of weeks, doing lots of interviews at work (finally made an offer to one chap), trying to get the garden sorted for winter — evena after shredding all the woody bits and setting them to mature a bit to use as mulch next year, I really do have enough green waste to fill the green wheelie bin for the rest of the year! And I can see and get at a lot of the front wall, so that needed painting (even though rain splattering has covered some of it with mud again, where the gutters overflow).

In between time I've been taking the chance to keep on harvesting blackberries — so prolific this year that I've been filling a lunchbox in half the time of previous years — maybe we really are going to have a hard winter. And that the crop is not being eaten by birds, just mildewing, shows how the ecology has been disturbed.

I've avoided looking for a new cat — Neil and Angela have acquired new kittens following their previous set expiring of old age, which gives Karen a little bit of a fix instead.

In the last couple of weeks, too, the duckweed in the pond has decided that it is autumn, and has gone from filling it to overflowing to fading and sinking; and the cyclepath on the M11 road bridge has at last been measured out with white paint marks every 20m. Maybe some time in the next year or so, the surface will finally be refurbished.