charles barrow's writing

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. ...

Gah, I missed my Halloween deadline. Is it too late to post photos of pumpkins? Of course not. These aren't carved into ghoulish and gruesome faces but presented straight off the vine as beautiful as nature intended. Nothing says Halloween like a pumpkin unless you count Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, and flesh eating zombies. I don't actually clebrate Halloween. Perhaps 'observe' is a better word than celebrate. It seems to have bumped Guy Fawkes Night right off the calender and I'd much rather watch fireworks lighting the sky than the neighbourhood youth causing havoc door to door. Also I'm not good with horror. Blowing up Parliament? Fine. Who hasn't thought of doing that? But evisceration, murder, black magic, hauntings? No thanks. The last horror film I sat through was probably Friday 13th, the original one, it scarred me for life and I've avoided any scary film since. I read ghost stories occassionally, Victorian ones, I can handle 19th century h...