Mist, brimstone and hubris.

I stepped out into the Night Planted Orchard and was transported to my childhood. The moisture in the November air was congealing into a fine fog, heavy and textured. Behind it was a layer of woodsmoke from bonfires away in the village. Behind that there was the scent of brimstone carried from distant fireworks. An ancient memory warmed me, filling my nostrils with hot Bovril fumes twisting up from a warm mug. In my mouth I could feel the heavy suet dumplings smothered in thick  steaming lobby cooked for many hours. In my memory, the bonfire is a soaring, ravenous beast, close enough to twizzle eyebrows and make wet woollen coats steam. In my memory bangers and crackerjacks crackle at my feet. In my memory, bonfire night is a warm, intimate thing made of family and fire, warm clothes and hot food in defiance of the spirit of winter peering hungrily from the trees. It had a hint of menace to remind us that nature is a predator only partially tamed. In my memory the fireworks, are more soft than loud, like tiny bonfires, remembrances of fallen summer flowers. I love fire and I love fireworks, and these memories are why.

Today the bonfires are more distant. The air has the more modern scent of scorched sugar on heavy meats which struggle to push aside that faint hint of the past. The fireworks are managed and remote. They climb suspensefully into the sky and detonate like the start of war over doomed cities. Now it is a more distant thing, more strategic. The cluster of autumn festivals has changed. They all hark back to that resistance of coming winter, whatever people might say. Where Halloween and Remembrance Day were once sombre and reflective in their different ways, they are becoming more celebratory. In your face, you enemies of ours. In your face, evil spirits. In your face, Winter, your days are numbered. We no longer try to scare spirits from the garden at this time, instead we assault the world. We are the predator and the world lights bonfires to keep us at bay.

Steel Wool

Where it touches the water the sleepy steel-wool wind sands the brass-rippled river free of its smooth shimmer. There is lemon-yellow metal lying on the flooded fields between the two rivers. The sun hides in the hedgerow, slyly slinking away, abandoning the day that it has failed to warm to a night of frosty daggers, creeping in with the growing shadows to cut down the last soldiers of summer and autumn. The fallen leaves turn to iced bronze, beaten copper and frozen blood, to be shattered and trampled. Within a few weeks they will have collapsed into a brown blanket. A kestrel stands on a post, calculating that I am too cold to catch it and so it will not expend precious calories by flying away. The little hunter – not so little now – is not treated with the same contempt as he trots into view, soaking wet and not caring one jot about the cold or the perfect mirror of the water that he has just shattered after another joyful plunge. After all, if the near-still wind can break the surface of the water, why shouldn't he. I throw his stick back at the glimmering mirror.