fall back

Autumn seems to have arrived very suddenly, seemingly all at once in the last few days. The wind and the heavy rains are dragging leaves off the trees and heaping them into soggy piles on the pathways, making a trip to the local shops a slippery and treacherous affair. And a lot of fungi, enjoying the damp and still relatively warm air, are sprouting in the verges around tree stumps, and giving off the earthy scent of decay.

Indoors, I'm dusting off fat church candles, to help light the dark corners of the room at night, and shaking out the thick sofa throws I'll use for extra warmth and to draft-proof myself on the sofa in the evenings. I've already made my first pot of minestrone soup of the season, and will be swapping out my summer salads for bowls of macaroni cheese, and veg chilli in the coming days. At the end of the week, at 2am on Sunday, the clocks will go back one hour, and the nights will draw in alarmingly quickly, and daylight will be all but done by 5.30pm.

I've been bookmarking films and documentaries to watch, as I'll be spending much more time indoors in the coming months, and will want the comfort of them. Plus, I've been stacking books into a literal literature pile, and planning my reading list to take me through to December and beyond. As mentioned last month my reading plans already included Trollope and Dickens, but I've added more Victoriana because the darkness, the chill, the atmosphere of the autumn and winter seasons seem to demand it. So there'll be some Victorian ghost stories, and I've also added Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Wilkie Collins's Armadale to my tbr stack. I'm planning to hibernate.


Photo is the author's own.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

twenty minutes

It's been three months since I last posted anything here, but that's a good thing. I've realised that I can spend my time blogging or I can spend that time writing my story and I've been story writing. I've now completed the first draft of Part Two (as I think of it). As I've mentioned before I'm back working full-time so have much less spare time now to devote to writing. Days off are spent catching up with family and friends, doing chores, tending my vegetable plot, all the stuff that everyone does to keep a life ticking over. So I find writing time in the mornings after breakfast and before leaving for work, in the evening while dinner is in the oven. Twenty minutes here and there is all I find but over the days and weeks that adds up. Those twenty minutes are hard won and I'd much rather spend them on the story than on blogging. So if all is quiet here then that's a good sign.
Read more

woolf and sackville-west

Image
Last week, in the company of dear friends, I was lucky enough to visit two beautiful English gardens, blooming in the June sunshine. Luckier still these gardens were attached to two different, very slightly 'stately', homes, once owned by two wonderful women writers. The first was Monk's House, in Sussex. A 17th century retreat, once owned by Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard. The few rooms in the house that we were allowed to walk through were gloomy, and atmospheric, and fascinating. But the room of real interest was Virginia's writing room. It was in a large summer house, set apart from the main house, further down the garden, amongst fruit trees and cottage garden borders. Unfortunately visitors weren't allowed to enter the room, but could gaze into it through large windows set in three sides of the building. The room was full of items that had once belonged to Virginia, and were arranged around the room, and on the desk, as if the room was still in use and...
Read more