Painters have often loved this time of year; the bright reddish-pink nights and silver moon mornings. Here in Cornwall if you go out early the air is crisp and you remember after a warm summer that your fingers have bones and your bones feel the chill. I remember my great uncle visiting from Australia in the summer looking at the countryside and sunshine and saying that everyone in Australia talks about foggy,foggy England. He couldn’t believe it was all so beautiful.
The wood pigeon was talking this morning and a few birds – a sad few – they levelled the forests here hundreds of years ago and the subsistence farming on the moor’s edge means ground cover is scarce. Then the Council’s made the farmers responsible for clearing the hedgerows along the minor roads so the farmers did the most obvious thing – they cut them right down so nothing would grow unexpectedly and where there were once shady places on roads there is now open sky.
Of course this means hedgerows are not knitted together by the roots of trees and do fall, but what is clearing up a road on which there is a ton of soil compared to being sued because a tree fell on a car? The animals have suffered a Depression for hundreds of years but no one cares enough to think about them.
Except for those like me, on chilly mornings who watch as my dogs listen to other dogs barking in the distance and I wonder what it would be like to understand what they know of the world.