Wednesday 13th September

Hopefully I am as precipitate as the weather, but Summer seems to be almost over.  We so look forward to July and August and the Marches Nocturnes, the Soirees Gourmandes, the Medieval Festival and the White Wine and Oyster Festival, and all the sheer exuberance and madness of Summer out here.  But all too soon, like the five lots of visiting relatives and friends, it is over.

We are now in the middle of September – and il pleut.  It is raining most days.  It has been a mixed summer; some lovely hot days and a few not so hot, but no really sustained spell of languorous lazy days in the sun.  Besides the Cafe has grown in popularity.  Hard to believe how busy we have been with bacon sandwiches and now poached egg on toast, which seems to be winning out most days.

But already the leaves are turning a paler green and some are almost brown, a few have fallen even.  And today – evidence that Summer is almost over.  Conkers.  The first conkers of Autumn have arrived.  Still in their green spiky packing cases, I trod on one while walking the dogs and as it split out popped the most perfect shiny round conker.  I looked around and found a few more.  I suppose it must be all those childhood memories of conker fights and pickling them and threading strings through them – but I simply love conkers.  The smoothness, the perfect rounded shapes, the colouration, with that pale bit in the middle.  Such a perfect gift of nature which has been manufactured, perfectly with bio-degradable outer packaging for millions of years before us messy humans arrived.  And more importantly will be dropping them for millions of years after we clumsy monkeys have shuffled off, hopefully taking all our plastic debris with us.  Conkers are the first sign for me that Summer is nearly over and Autumn is on its way..