

''Autumn is upon us. The pedants might cling to the notion that summer is not officially over until the autumnal equinox towards the end of September, but most of us know better than to waffle on about the tilt of the earth's axis. That's not what announces autumn. It's the renewed traffic chaos of the school run that announces autumn; the sexy new TV schedules; the first full month of the football season.''
So says Brian Viner in The Independent,today!
I rather enjoyed reading his article as I was
' doing the rounds' of the papers, online.
I then turned to 'The Guardian' and found this different take on 'Autumn',
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/sep/01/culture-flash-autumn
'' Autumn is the Ringo of the seasons...''
I liked that rather, splendid metaphor!
(Discuss...LOL!)
During Autumns gone by, the Impressionist artists must have had a field day!!
They were all at it in Autumn, it seems...
Firstly, Vincent's efforts ...
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
The first sorrow of autumn
Is the slow goodbye
Of the garden who stands so long in the evening-
A brown poppy head,
The stalk of a lily,
And still cannot go.
The second sorrow
Is the empty feet
Of a pheasant who hangs from a hook with his brothers.
The woodland of gold
Is folded in feathers
With its head in a bag.
And the third sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the sun who has gathered the birds and who gathers
The minutes of evening,
The golden and holy
Ground of the picture.
The fourth sorrow
Is the pond gone black
Ruined and sunken the city of water-
The beetle's palace,
The catacombs
Of the dragonfly.
And the fifth sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the woodland that quietly breaks up its camp.
One day it's gone.
It has only left litter-
Firewood, tentpoles.
And the sixth sorrow
Is the fox's sorrow
The joy of the huntsman, the joy of the hounds,
The hooves that pound
Till earth closes her ear
To the fox's prayer.
And the seventh sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the window
As the year packs up
Like a tatty fairground
That came for the children.
Ted Hughes
*****
And what about the children?
Ah well, apart from
taking them out into the woods, country lanes
fields etc with their cameras, sketchbooks...
and not forgetting the odd 'I Spy' book or two,
I think we all know that for children, you need go no further
than these wonderful Ladybird books!!