True Blue.

The last true-blue warm evening of the summer was occupied taking Uncle Eddie's kayak for a spin on the North Sea. After almost an hour's searching, Ellie and Will located the boat and the three of us trooped down to the water - the two true adventurers in their swimming suits, me in a woolly jumper and scarf. I watched and photographed and soaked in the last of the sunshine, and Ellie and Will (real seafarers) took turns paddling out to sea. Sometimes it's nice to be the observer, and these photographs - so bright, so blue - remind how fun it was to spend the last sunny night of the season beside the rolling waves, watching my two best friends having a whale of a time.  

Scenes of autumn.

Some days contentment is as simple as the gentle lullaby that is the sound of the autumn rain on my windowsill. Is there anything so melodic? The rain began on Monday and it will not cease. The shroud of a long and stagnant summer - one so sizzling it burst in, unanticipated, like a firework - has finally lifted and there is relief, and a certain beauty, in its ending.

There is beauty in the curling of the leaves and in the curling of a mouth, when translated into a smile on my grandfather's lined and handsome face. There is pleasure in a return to old, in the pulling on of a forgotten sweater still scratchy at the wrists, and in the cupping of a warm mug of tea between fingers. And there is comfort in the slow rumble of the underground, as the windows steam with the heat of crowded bodies and the cool of the continuing downpour outside.

Often the last waltz of summer, and the ensuing fall, seems Mother Nature's round of hide and seek - an elaborate game of cat-and-mouse, an ever-quickening see-saw between crisp days of sun and cooler, darker nights. This year, autumn has simply arrived. Sandals to socks weather in the space of a night. In a world full of uncertain uncertainties, there is some peculiar comfort in that. 

Tights have already premiered, and fourteen stitches of a new, wine red scarf have been sewn. Yesterday our favourite neighbours and friends sat with us around their fireplace, the youngest daughter curled cat-like on the carpet beside crackling flames. Transport for London have switched off the air conditioning on the tubes, and today I might just pull on my boots for the walk to meet a dear friend. 

The air is sweeter, and I'm breathing it in.

Words.

"Autumn, the year's last, loveliest smile." - William Bryant

"Life becomes easier when you learn to accept an apology you never got." - Robert Brault

“Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.” Yousuf Karsh

“Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.” - Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's

Her sentences were icebergs, with just the tip of her thought coming out of her mouth, and the rest kept up in her head, which I was starting to think was more and more beautiful the longer I looked at her. - Gregory Galloway

“At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds." - Rainer Maria Rilke

"The more you know who you are and what you want the less you let things upset you." - Bob Harris, Lost in Translation

“That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.” - Ray Bradbury

*photograph from a Regensburg autumn.

Coming soon to a bookstore near you.

Sometimes, if not often, it is achingly difficult to write about what you love. The tabby cat sits curled by my knees, I lie covered by an old crochet throw and it's raining. I’ve been wondering for hours how to put this last week into words.

Let me write this. That today we drove away from the small fishing town we had been allowed to call home for one glorious week; as the five of us loaded the boots and checked under beds for runaway shoes, there was a fitting bite to the air. Autumn on our heels. By the time we had rolled through the string of towns laced corset-like to the highway - towns with pleasingly evocative Saxon names like Grundisburgh, Dallishoo and Saxmundham - a fine drizzle had appeared and summer seemed a far-off memory. Another of those mislaid possessions under the bed.

 

A novelist could not have plotted it better. Family and assorted friends who feel like relatives, and relatives who feel like friends, spend glorious week by the seaside – relishing 25 degree days, mid-afternoon swims aplenty, in a towering house just minutes from the sea.

Days are filled with swimming, walking and riding rusted bicycles along the coastal road. They eat well: smoked fish from wind-beaten huts on the shingle, tart cider brewed with local apples, salted caramel ice cream cones, coffee and croissants with jam in the morning. Friends from near and far drop by to join in on these magnificent feasts. One such friend just happens to own a sea kayak anchored in the park opposite the beach house, so on the very last evening – a twilight draped in molten sunshine – they lug the boat towards the shore and revel in the last hours of a golden summer atop a shiny blue sea.

Waking up on the final morning, the wind has turned bracing, the air is cool. Said family drive away in the early morning light, sad to say goodbye, but happy that summer has concluded with such happiness and warmth. Novelist delights at her skilled use of pathetic fallacy. 

But this is no novel, of course. All this really happened and I’m left thanking my lucky stars (and gorgeous family/friends/Mother Nature) for a week brimming with so much fun that I am forced to pinch myself, just to check it really did come to pass.

(More photos, less metaphor on Ellie's little corner of the web.)

Late Summergrams

1) We spent the bank holiday driving to Suffolk to visit Grandad in his sweet old house. We laughed, chatted, admired the garden and whizzed around giddily on Rex's speedy electric bicycle! (Disclaimer: Do not try this at home.)

2) My week was all about reading books recommended by library customers and friends, and enough form-filling to make any office worker swoon (accompanied by homemade blueberry cakes.) Oh, the life of a graduate!

3) The late afternoon sunshine, these flowers and this mischevious face all made me smile. 

 4) Will and I drove southwards for a birthday party (well, Will drove and I sang along to Van Morrison and complained about his driving!) The most perfect thing was our spontaneous stop-off at Hayling Island beach. Denim blue water, wind in the hair and stones in the shoes are oh so good for the soul, I think. 

5) Feeling thankful for cuddles with the same kitty we've snuggled since I was seven, and giggly coffee catch-ups with true blue high school friends. La vita e bella!

How was your week?

The Curious County.

Lately, my sister has started calling Suffolk her 'happy place'. I know why. The drives are long and the waves are rough. The stars bright and the sunsets vivid. The hydrangeas burn a lively pink and the fishermen wear their wrinkles deeper, prouder.

Suffolk has a reputation for being a 'curious' county. Home of authors, countrymen, hideaway farmers. Crime novels are routinely staged here, something in the desolate marshes and inky water inspiring mystery and intrigue. Benjamin Britten was born and died here. George Orwell chose his pen-name after the name of the river snaking towards Ipswich.

Should you go, be sure to take a walk at sunset along the marshes. Be sure to rent a coloured rowboat on Thorpeness Meare, get lost in the tangled undergrowth and admire the iconic House in the Clouds. Pick wild blackberries and tread barefoot across pebbled beaches at dusk. Buy fish from the fisherman's huts by the water in Aldeburgh. Cycle past the glowering nuclear power plant at Sizewell (and wonder if the fish are radioactive.) Take a blanket down to the beach at dusk and watch the stars begin to twinkle.

Monday marks the beginning of our annual start-of-autumn trip to Suffolk. We're planning on walking, swimming, laughing, photographing. If you need me next week, you'll find me on Aldeburgh's sands, tucked up in my blanket, stars for company. 

*All photographs taken with my film camera, September 2012.

What Might Have Been.

Much of this week was spent running through the cobbled streets of Durham (a quaint city-town in the North-East) with Will's family, attempting to pack in four castles in three days (we did it!) and see numerous sites of medieval importance. We tore through the place at the pace of the Norman conquerors of yesteryear - eating teacakes on Palace Green early in the morning, climbing the three hundred plus steps to the cathedral's peak and admiring the holy Lindisfarne Gospels late at night. 

I spent much of our visit quietly pondering the 'what might have beens'. Over four years ago, after a flurry of emails and academic exchanges, Durham University offered me a place to study liberal arts at St. Cuthbert's College (which the students, allegedly, affectionately call 'Cuth's'). I ummed and aahed, hesitated and wondered, but I had never been to Durham and Bristol's Victorian villas and elegant bridge had already stirred my imagination. 

I spent a frenzied, gorgeous, exciting and life-changing (there's my dramatic side again) in Bristol, hundreds of miles from St. Cuthbert's and never regretted my choice. It was only driving into the city on Wednesday, five years on and a lifetime in between, that the cogs of my mind began to whir and I remembered my fleeting encounter with the place quite suddenly. In four years elsewhere, I had not thought of Durham once. 

The city was lovely, entirely different from Bristol - small and quiet, sweetly romantic and sat in the bend of a mighty river (just like Regensburg). All climbing ivy, hidden windows, secret passageways, damp cobbles and the patchworked sandstone of a thousand years. The what-might-have-beens tumbled through in sequence and I could quite imagine the life I'd never known. Autumn walks up the hill towards the green, wrapped up in my duffel coat with a pile of books in my arms. Riverside picnics and late-night library nights overlooking the cathedral. Sandwiches at the market square and a date with a nice boy in a window seat on a rainy winter's day. Coffee in the teashop on Palace Green and a job in the bookshop on the street sloping northwards. We even ambled by the college where I would have lived. It is a beautiful street, cobbled and old, and I'd have been joyous there. 

I would not change my seasons in Bristol for all the world, but sometimes it's nice to imagine, isn't it?  Somewhere out there my alter-ego is wandering those ancient streets in her duffel coat, holding hands with the boy in the window, a bookbag over her shoulder. Perhaps one day I'll write my novel about the girl who chose Durham and wouldn't change her seasons there for all the world.

Isn't He Handsome + New Beginnings

I really love beginnings. 

I love beginnings almost as much as I honest-to-goodness hate goodbyes. I suppose I love beginnings because of my deep-rooted dislike of endings,  beginnings composing the antithesis of goodbyes. Goodbyes find me choking back tears, weepy and sorrowful (no matter how short-lived: maybe I'm just dramatic). Thus it makes perfect sense that the arch enemy of the ending - the beginning - installs a happiness deep in my bones.

Autumn and beginnings are a pair deeply intertwined in my thoughts, new starts running like seams through the fabric of that golden season. Autumn has always been a time for fresh starts: terms commencing anew and the accompanying crisp white notebooks, fresh uniforms, promise of blank slates, unknown faces and new shoes. 

Good things happen all year round, but my thoughts always trick me into believing good things happen mostly in the autumn. There is little innate truth in such a statement, but of course, I can think of all sorts of great things which happened and happen in the fall to support my persuasive mind. I moved to Bristol one autumn. Two years later, in the autumn, I moved to Regensburg. I fell in love in the autumn. And autumn in my head is everything I adore - all cups of steaming coffee, knitted scarves, curling up with a novel beside a fireplace, walks through the amber leaves and nourishing homemade soups on the table. Perhaps because the season is so fleeting, my memories of it are imbued with a hazy glow, unrivalled by summer, winter, spring. 

But my funny old mind's theory has been proven again this year because, already, especially great things are happening. My sister is pursuing her dreams and I have a new job at a new library. 

Most excitingly, my love (isn't he handsome? doesn't that smile make your heart just expire?) is getting his very own, grown-up new beginning this autumn. Walking through the grounds of Bamburgh Castle this week, far away from home, he picked up the phone and was offered a (dreamy) job as a translator in a sweet little pocket of London, doing almost exactly what he wants to do for a living. His smile says it all, doesn't it? 

Autumn, you're doing it again. 

So here's to new beginnings. And smiles that make the heart melt (see above).