To begin with, lots of the most senior politicians are called secretaries instead of ministers, which is confusing. There’s a Secretary of State for everything from Education to Defence. No wonder secretaries proper are called Personal Assistants now. If a Secretary of State has a deputy, these are called Undersecretaries, suggesting a vertical office layout. Then there are the Cabinet Secretaries, who presumably work from a closet.

Other titles make their holders sound more like an instrument used to keep letters closed or a sea creature than a politician, to wit the Lord Privy Seal, currently the ‘Rt Hon Sir George Young Bt MP’. The Lord Privy Seal also sounds like something you would have used to securely close a Victorian toilet. Then there are the Assistant Whips, Lord Commissioner (Whip)s, and the Chief Whip. I had no idea corporal punishment was still prevalent in parliament here. Other titles fill an entire line before you get to the person’s name, such as the Captain of the Honourable Corps of the Gentlemen at Arms (Lords Chief Whip), who follows it with the equally hefty nominer Rt Hon Baroness Anelay of St Johns DBE. Finally there are the Baronesses in Waiting and the Lords in Waiting, who are presumably anticipating a change of government.

Titles aside, there are plenty of amusing names amongst the British government. The ugliest member of the previous Labour government was called Lord Adonis.The current Culture Secretary is called Jeremy Hunt, which is fine unless you are a broadcaster and accidentally swap the first letters of ‘Hunt’ and ‘Culture’ as a senior interviewer did recently on a morning radio programme that has 6.6 million listeners. Ouch.

Once I plucked up the courage to put my toe gingerly in the water and tried travelling for myself, things changed. The great unknown Overseas became less unknown and I discovered the wonder and joy of travel. Airports took on the tantalising gleam of being the gateway to the endless possibilities of the rest of the world, so big that I could never run short of new and exciting places to go.

Having lived overseas for several extended periods and done as much travelling as possible during that time I have spent lots of time in airports, and found the quirky and the quaint alongside the tedious and the dull. British airports, for example, often feel more like a trial than an exciting first step on a journey; perhaps if you can survive the grimness of Heathrow or the queues elsewhere you are some way to being prepared for a British winter or English public transport.

The newer English airports are built like barns: huge, white, airy spaces that seem to have been divided up with walls and shops as an afterthought. The check-in halls and retail areas are often so huge and intimidating it’s hard even to find the signage to navigate through them. British airport authorities are also fond of doing things en masse, so every last passenger in the airport seems to be herded into the same queues for security screenings and passport checks. This may make staffing easier but an hour waiting for passport control behind a jetload of antipodeans is not a pleasant way to spend time on a Sunday evening when you’re still suffering from a Moroccan stomach bug.

The British Airports Authority also seem to be intent on maximising every chance for earning money through retail space. Doubtless this helps explain why it’s said to be the world’s most profitable airport company. In some of its airports, simply requiring passengers to pass by a myriad of shops on the way to the gate isn’t enough and the only way to get to your plane is through of a duty free shop, winding your way between perfume stands and supposedly cheap alcohol. Mind you, this can come in handy when you have time to kill: the Beloved and I spent several happy hours in Stansted waiting for a plane in September, him watching a football match in a bar and me browsing books and perfume. Nonetheless, by the time we noticed that our plane was ready it was on Final Call and it cost £30 just to eat lunch.

My favourite airport in the whole world is Charles de Gaulle in Paris, which is all seventies space age, but is neither dated nor faded, instead wearing an air of classic style like a Chanel coat. It’s built as a cylinder criss-crossed by shiny tubes that contain ramp escalators connecting the various floors. Where most airports feel like enormous barns, Charles de Gaulle is all small spaces; intimate cafes and comfortable check-in areas, which means you can eat well in peace and it’s remarkably quiet. And elegant.

In Thailand, the airport was a joy, but more because it was a respite from heat and chaos (wonderful chaos, but hard work). After three weeks of travelling around in a heatwave, we were ready for its cool calmness. We had battled idiosyncratic transport in out-of-the-way places and cheerfully managed cheap accommodation that wasn’t always cool and comfortable. We negotiated the manic, jammed cities and ate on plastic chairs from street stalls and markets as well as unfancy restaurants, ever careful to go somewhere reasonably clean. After this, the airport was a godsend, and I remember it really clearly. Calm, light, airy. Clean, free toilets. Cool. Quiet compared to the chaos in the streets outside. Places to sit everywhere. The prospect of 11 hours to sit quietly in airconditioned comfort and watch movies whilst someone else brought me food at regular intervals. Pleasant!

Sometimes airports feel like carbon-copies of one another with even the same dull shops in them. Other times they are ridiculously quirky, and this is particularly true of small airports. The exponential growth of budget airlines in the last decade has seen lots of tiny provincial airports reborn as bustling regional hubs. Many of these are in towns and cities within reach of larger, more attractive destinations but flights to them are sold as flights to the larger cities, leading to lots of disgruntled passengers finding themselves not in Frankfurt or Barcelona, but in Hahn or Girona, an hour or more from the city they actually wished to visit. In some cases, these flights are to entirely different, interesting cities, such as Bergamo or Pisa, instead of Milan or Florence.

This sudden availability of flights to small regional destinations has led me to visit lots of tiny airports, some of which seem slightly overcome by the new volume of passengers. In December we flew to Perugia which has an airport the size of an olympic swimming pool, and receives the grand total of one flight a day in winter. Arriving, we watched our luggage driven across the tarmac, after which the staff opened some glass doors directly into the arrivals hall and loaded the bags onto a miniature luggage carousel the size of a small car. The car rental company seemed to be operating out of a cupboard. Leaving, we found the check-in counter was a makeshift lecturn with no computer, and the girl behind it crossed our names off on a printed list. It was all very basic: even the surly security staff had steadfastly refused to learn to say ‘would you take out your laptop’ in English. After security every last passenger was crammed into the single departure lounge that was the size of a small shop. This being Italy, there were no queueing mechanisms, so a massive crush ensued. Sometimes the British obesssion with queuing is convenient.

Supposedly the best airport in the world is Singapore’s newish facility, which offers the passenger on a brief long-haul stopover cheap, clearn showers and snoozing chairs with built-in alarm clocks. All in all, most of us want to get in and out of airports as fast as possible, but it’s impossible to avoid them altogether when travelling long distances. For a seasoned traveller, a decent airport is worth paying a little bit more on your ticket for.

To begin with it felt as though I’d never escape from England and English speakers in order to immerse myself into the stylish delights of France – I seemed to be haunted by Australia, even though I was travelling from the English Midlands, where Antipodeans are not exactly thick on the ground. It started on the plane, where just in front of my back-row seat was a loud Australian with a very thick accent who inadvertently made herself known to all around her.

What came next was slightly more surreal. Once we were airborn, one of our cheerful flight attendants Flo and Amy did a slightly unusual version of the necessary announcements about drinks, snacks and toilets fitted with smoke detectors. She feigned a strong Australian drawl, only the occasional slip into a south-eastern English accent giving her away. It wasn’t a short announcement, either, after the toilets came an explanation about the currencies that the snack bar accepted, and the exchange rate offered. All in a thick, ocker twang. Weird. It didn’t feel really like a compliment to a pleasantly musical lilt like it might have if they’d gone Irish, and English folk aren’t known for their love of Australian accents. So it felt vaguely insulting, but not enough to bother complaining about. Mainly it was just odd.

But by the time we’d landed and I was safely on the train into the city centre I was sure I was finally immersed in Paris. Then I noticed the magazine that someone had left on the seat beside me. It was a copy of the December edition of Australian Woman’s Weekly. Oh dear. I took it home anyway and caught up on the love lives of new B-list television personalities I’d never heard of. Fortunately, apart from the dear Australian friend I was in Paris to visit, the remainder of my weekend was reassuringly Parisian. And very elegant.

Mostly, we ate. An old Parisian brasserie for dinner, at which I devoured the bread on the side with a hunger born of a year somewhere where the bread is awful. For breakfast, pastries as well as baguettes spread with glorious butter. For lunches, buttery, creamy, bacony quiche – and a bit of baguette on the side. I was starting to feel like I might turn into a delicious, chewy, crusty, not-too-light bread stick. All of what we ate was simple and delicious; and if elegant can be described as unfussy grace, the food certainly qualified.

Also elegant were the shops. The contrast with Britain was strong, as the UK is plagued by retail franchises, to the point where independent shops are a tiny minority and every shopping strip looks drearily similar. The fine quartiere of Paris in which we browsed couldn’t have been more different. We never quite made it to the planned exhibition, and spent the afternoon strolling, chatting, and oohing over the delightful shops.

Everywhere you looked was a chocolatier, a butcher, a shop selling only Spanish olive oil.  There was the world’s first department store in its restored art-nouveau elegance, all airy and white with ornate skylights and a lovely atrium. We perused the scented candles that cost half a day’s wages and were each stored under an elegant glass dome to keep their fragrances fresh. Next door was an astonishing food hall; elsewhere quaint accessories to put with your perfectly-behaved Parisian children. Further on, a greengrocer whose window was festooned with garlands made from tomatoes and green vegetables. Only in Paris are even the vegetables elegant.

Mysterious, slightly hypnotic, mostly completely indecipherable to the average listener: this is the shipping forecast is broadcast on the BBC’s Radio 4 several times a day. Despite being of no relevance whatsoever to almost anyone on the British mainland, this 350-word missal has a cult following, and hundreds of thousands of people are thought to listen to it.

Low Tyne 993 expected Sweden 998 by 0600 tomorrow. New deepening Atlantic low expected 350 miles southwest of Iceland 972 by same time.

People are said to enjoy the poetry of the report, its rhythm, the evocative names and its slight air of arcane mystery. When I chance upon it I like its curious grammar, which means it isn’t as smooth as normal speech. It sounds like someone reading a dictionary, or something in another language that they can pronounce but not understand. They have to assume it makes sense.

Viking: Mainly northwesterly 4 or 5, increasing 6 at times, becoming variable 3 later.

Supposedly the 12.48am forecast is particularly popular with listeners who enjoy feeling safe and warm tucked up in bed whilst the careful, slow voice lists gales and rough seas in exotic, faraway places. The report finishes with a goodnight message before the station closes for the night.

North Utsire, South Utsire: Southeasterly becoming cyclonic then northerly 5 to 7. Moderate or poor, becoming good.

The shipping forecast is broadcast on Radio 4, the equivalent of Australia’s Radio National. Radio 4 is a highbrow talk station that broadcasts serious and hard-hitting current affairs and analysis interspersed by all sorts of other things, from a daily radio play to fantastic documentaries and histories, offbeat comedy, a daily radio play (surely an endangered species) as well as programmes on the arts, food and all sorts of other things. There’s also a fifteen-minute daily soap called The Archers that’s been running for seventy years.

Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger: Cyclonic or northwesterly, backing southerly later, 5 to 7, occasionally gale 8 at first.

The Radio 4 audience is mainly well educated middle-class types with a heavy bent towards older listeners. Not surprisingly given its esoteric focus, I love it. This week, for example, there was everything from an interview with the Deputy Prime Minister to pieces on murderous children, the role of classical music in the French Resistance, the largest molecule known to chemistry and a radio play about a 47-year-old pregnant woman.

Thames, Dover, Wight, Portland, Plymouth, Biscay: Northwesterly backing southerly or southwesterly 4 or 5, increasing 6 or 7 at times. Good, occasionally poor.

Thames, Dover and so on are names for regions of the sea around Britain, some of which have even more curious names that don’t necessarily refer to adjacent land.

Fitzroy, Sole, Lundy, Fastnet: northwest backing southwest 5 to 7, decreasing 4 for a time. Rough, becoming very rough except in Lundy. Occasional rain. Good, occasionally poor.

Far from being the pet habit of lonely pensioners, the shipping forecast is something of a British institution. It has been mentioned in songs by everyone from Blur to Jethro Tull and was the subject of a poem by Seamus Heaney as well as several other famous series of paintings, photographs and collected writings. There have been the inevitable string of parodies including predictions of shopping trips and midlife crises and reams of references in film and TV in everything from Keeping Up Appearances to Dead Ringers.

Fair Isle, Faeroes: Northerly veering easterly 5 to 7, perhaps gale 8 later in Faeroes, decreasing 4 at times. Rough or very rough. Wintry showers. Good, occasionally poor.

I love the fact that the presenters could be reading gibberish for all the sense it makes to them, despite the recognisable format and terminology. I’m intrigued by forecasts such as ‘Good, occasionally very poor’, which reads like a school report and makes me wonder how the weather can be good everywhere with a sudden patch of ‘very poor’. Intriguing indeed.

WordPress sent me a summary email about 2010 on this blog (apparently it’s ‘on fire’. Hmmn), which caused me to reflect a bit on where it’s been and where it’s going. Lucid Ephemera is now more than eighteen months old. I started the blog because I love writing and I would write it even if nobody else read it. But it IS wonderful to be read and I’ve been humbled and gratified by the number of you from all over the place who have taken to visiting this blog on a regular basis. Some of you I know personally and it’s been nice to keep in touch (albeit in a slightly one-sided way) with you from the other side of the world; others of you I have got to know, a little, through your comments – thank you.  And many of you I’ll never know at all, save that your visit creates a little dot on a map for me, letting me know only where you’re from, and nothing else. I’m delighted and humbled to be read everywhere from Cape Town to Colorado, from Columbus Ohio to Cyprus, from Winnipeg to Estonia. Thanks for dropping in.

Life for me is going to change radically later in 2011 for a number of substantial reasons, and I’m not sure where Lucid Ephemera will wash up. In the meantime, for those of you that are regular visitors, I’d love to hear what – if anything – you’d like to hear more or less of on this blog, or indeed anything else you want to tell me. My brother once told me he’d like to hear more about people on this blog; perhaps you’re keen on English rhododendrons or the demographics of West Indian communities in the English Midlands. I’ll do my best. Leave a comment, if you have a moment. Happy New Year.

After the blizzards last week, the snow did not continue into this week. But the conditions got worse. Temperatures remained below freezing constantly, preventing any melting of the snow covering the fields, parks, roofs and anywhere else undisturbed. While through roads were regularly salted and gritted to keep them safe, roads like our little cul-de-sac were not. The snow was compacted by foot and tyre traffic and then froze into a thick layer of greyish white ice ribbed with shallow tyre tracks and ruts. It was slippery and I was extremely thankful that it was completely flat. Footpaths became similarly treacherous. I took to wearing runners whenever I was outside, even if only to cross the car park.

It got colder. First there were temperatures of one or two degrees below zero overnight, which were not unusual. Then it got to -7 one night and we shivered with horror as much as cold. The days began to remain frigid, too, with highs of a few degrees below zero. They then dropped again, and there was the morning that the car thermometer hit -8 as I drove to work. I had to take a photo.

Then there was the day when the temperature hit -10 as I drove to work, and rose only a few degrees during the day. The Met Office forecast ominous-sounding ‘freezing fog’, which sounded like magically cursed mist that would turn you into an ice block upon contact. That was the day the trees froze. My colleagues pointed out that you could tell they were frozen because they were all dusted with a gorgeous sprinkling of white, like something from a Christmas card. So too was the rosemary in our garden, which snapped off in my fingers, frozen solid.

At this point, all bets were off. I gave up my morning walks. I had been undeterred by darkness, by light rain had even enjoyed lovely walks during a sprinkling of snow when the world was white and empty and eerily silent. I gave up going outside at all – except to scurry between car and home car and office – and went to bed restless with inactivity. Everything took longer to get warm: the hot water, the car heating, the bathroom. I had to drink from the warm water tap as the cold water came close to freezing my teeth.

The cold continued to throw up challenges. My colleague’s sleek sports car, which was buried in the first snowfalls, remained unreachable. It was parked on a steep slope and the combination of ice and snow was too much for its front-wheel-drive (or was it rear-wheel-drive?) to navigate. Another colleague’s horses were without water because the troughs and pipes that supplied the fields and stables were frozen. She couldn’t even boil a kettle because there was no water to fill it with, only ice. She was forced to bring water in buckets from elsewhere. There were also unexpected benefits. Shopping and packed lunches remained cold if left in the car, more likely to freeze than go off. But this was rarely of use, as we avoided any non-essential errands that required going out.

In Edinburgh, they had thirty inches of snow. It had a strange and marked effect on the population. Perfect strangers were seen on the street helping one another and random violent crime rates dropped away. After dark, a convivial peace descended and motorists genially and uncomplainingly wound their way through pedestrians walking on the roads to avoid the icy footpaths. When a double-decker bus slipped on the ice and toppled over, no one complained at the resulting temporary cessation of all bus services. There were icicles so big and thick that the fire brigade had to be called in to hack them away with axes. Eventually, the army was called in to clear the snow.

While Edinburgh remains in the grip of its freeze, things here began to improve. After days and days of looking in despair and horror at the weather forecast, I sighed with relief when the Met Office began to predict top temperatures of two or three degrees above zero for the days ahead. I danced a small jig of joy when it came true and my car thermometer hit zero again. I never thought I would find zero degrees mild, but it felt so much better than -10.  Now the predictions are for temperatures above zero for the foreseeable future. Although given the conservative Met Office this is not very far ahead, it’s a huge relief nonetheless.

As in a heatwave, suddenly the normal rules don’t apply. At work, those who live in more remote villages or on small country roads are allowed to go home when more snowfalls threaten to prevent them getting there. Those senior enough to work from home do so if they have a long journey to the office. We’ve even had the only days of the year (apart from Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve) on which the Chief Executive has excused people to go home early.

Like extreme heat in Australia, heavy snowfalls in Britain cause havoc despite being entirely predictable and an occasional rather than completely unexpected occurrence. The snow halts the electricity supply to train lines and strands passengers overnight in their trains. Roads become blocked and drivers get stuck overnight in their cars. In Northumbria this week, a bunch of truck drivers were forced to abandon their vehicles and camp in a village hall for three days. They were treated royally by the villagers who supplied them with camp beds and hot meals. The snow has also closed thousands of schools, although the reasons for this remain opaque as offices and businesses almost never shut for this reason. Some airports were not so lucky and were closed for days. All this frustrates my Estonian colleague, who says that snow is an entirely predictable occurrence and that in Estonia life continues as normal. Everyone switches to snow tyres and snow procedures and gets on with things. Here not so much.

For me, the snow presents a whole new set of challenges. Getting into the car after a heavy night’s snow is the first. The car is covered in several centimetres of fresh white powder. Opening the door disrupts this delicate blanket and sends a shower of snow into the car onto my seat. Damn. I brush it off. The windows, too are covered in snow, but if I lower them all the way a shower of white flakes will fall into the car. I drop the windows to half way then raise them again. Perfect. The windscreen is easier: the snow is easily wiped away. Not so a layer of ice, for which we have a scraper for thick layers and a bottle of special windscreen de-icer spray for thinner layers. This works a treat, but does sometimes leave smears across the windscreen. For this, I first try the windscreen washer. The water freezes, and I have another layer of ice on my windscreen. Oops. At the traffic lights I stick my arm out the window and spray the windscreen with de-icer again. I’m left with smears again.

By Friday, the weather has got even colder and the car is even more inhibited. The windscreen wipers are frozen and shudder across the glass. The windows are frozen shut. The heating takes ten minutes to warm up. Brrrrr. When the snow stops, things get more treacherous. Instead of a fresh layer of powdery, soft snow for shoes and tyres to grip, we have hard and compacted layers of snow that have been frozen into ice. This is very slippery. The ice and snow presents other new challenges. I have to wear waterproof shoes to travel the two metres from car to home and ten metres from car to office, or I end up with wet feet. High heels for a fancy dinner are an even greater problem in slush and ice. The beloved refuses to leave the house entirely apart from to be ferried from door to door, because of the entirely justified fear that his recently reconstructed knee might be torn apart again by a slip on the ice.

For all the harsh connotations of ‘extreme’ weather, it’s extremely pretty in a gentle way. Soft and silent. Sound is muffled so things seem peaceful without quite so much of the hum of traffic. The snow makes even the most mundane objects look like something out of a Christmas card and everything from traffic lights to wheelie bins has a festive white topping. When the sun comes out, it’s absolutely stunning. In a different way, even in the early morning when I am game enough to venture out for a walk before work, it’s pretty under the streetlights when there is no-one else around. At this time the silence of snow is even more noticeable. I’m taking lots of photos: stay tuned.

To start with, I was apprehensive. The gym itself was in a small, industrial-looking building with the kind of jagged roof with skylights that you find in factories (which indeed the gym seemed to have been in a previous life). It was behind a small supermarket, next to some bins, and had a green neon sign outside with a picture of flexed biceps. Inside there were no frills. Bare brick walls, concrete floor, well-used equipment and fluorescent strip lighting. This bothered me not at all but I was slightly intimidated by the clientele. Mainly because there were almost no other girls. They were all blokes; blokes lifting weights, blokes doing boxing training, blokes running on treadmills. I felt conspicuous. To add to the macho atmosphere there were even some faded, eighties-style posters on the wall of over-muscled women in outdated leotards. They made me feel vaguely uncomfortable.

Then I realised the posing women bodybuilders on the walls were far outnumbered by posters of male body-builders. Men who were nut-brown, oiled and shiny, giant clumps of vein-bulging muscle, usually with a broad grin on top. They were also no more frequent than ads for protein. I’m quite fond of protein when it forms part of an egg or a lentil or a lamb rump, but this was a different animal entirely. These posters promoted protein that came in a powdered form and was consumed as a shake, for the purpose of muscle-building. Interesting. And doubtless not half as fun or tasty. I was starting to get the idea that in this gym the bodies that the members were most interested were their own.

Gradually I began to settle in. The guy on the front desk, the owner, was genuinely nice in an un-smarmy way. He came to my aid when I couldn’t work out how to turn on the treadmill or wandered around lost with a puzzled ‘I’m-sure-there-was-a-quad-machine-somewhere-here’ look on my face. He huge, built like a battleship, his little head perched on top of his shoulders like a bird on the back of a bull. I expected Mr Muscly to have a macho name like Mitch or Mike. He was called Colin.

I have now  realised that no one takes the slightest bit of notice of me, and that there will almost always at least one other girl in the place. I have come to appreciate the rather interesting slice of life on display in this peculiar institution. For a start, far from being full of muscled body builders, the gym is in fact populated by an odd-bod collection of students, old men and middle-aged men, all of whom looked much of a muchness in their sloppy track pants.

But what makes this gym stick out from all the others I’ve been a member of is that this it is geared toward boxing. And not just box-a-cise or self-defence, real boxing. In one corner is a small grove of punching bags; next to it a boxing ring and further on a variety of other cordoned-off padded rings for bouncing and blows. Each time I go there are a couple of contenders circling each other in the ring. Half the time they are grinning at each other, landing teasing taps rather than actual punches, and finding the whole thing hilarious. Other times they rain streams of blows onto the carefully raised gloves of their opponent as a training exercise. Another regular holds frequent sessions with a punching bag in which he provides his own sound effects. Each time his glove hits the bag he shouts ‘PAH!’, so that the boppy music broadcast across the room is punctuated by a stream of ‘PAH, PAH, PAH’. Even on the other side of the gym, reading my magazine on the cross trainer, I have dribbling into my ear a constant ‘PAH, PAH, PAH’. This is indeed a curious place.

This has been particularly welcome because as so often happens, Britiain didn’t have a proper summer this year. At least a proper summer by anybody else’s standards. It started well: in June we had a few days of gorgeous warmth when we basked in the gentle sun and floated about in mild evenings, with the parks full of people frolicking and picnicking. After a couple of days I got excited and bought a couple of items of summer clothing and had a couple of light dresses posted over from Australia. It wasn’t that warm but the humidity made it feel warmer, permitting sleevelessness and blanket-less sleeping. Then the more usual form of British summer weather returned. During June, July, August and September it rarely reached twenty degrees, and it drizzled. A lot. My light summer dresses stayed hanging hopefully in my bedroom, and didn’t get a single wear. Not one.
So by autumn we were hopeful of some Indian summer, some mild sunshine in which to enjoy the last of the long days. That didn’t happen either.

Fortunately, after all this disappointment, October was spectacular. It was clear and sunny and we basked in relief at a break in the gloom.

At first, there was little autumn colour. The trees stayed green, with the odd outbreak of yellow here and there. In the carpark at work, a spindly sapling broke the mould with a spectacular show of yellow, then orange turning to red at the tips. Then, within a few days, everything was yellow. And orange, and even red in places. Driving past the park the trees seemed to be on fire, and gusts of wind carried flurries of yellow leaves like a bright snowstorm. One day the tree outside our flat was all green, the next day it was yellow, the next orange turning to red.

Two days later it was almost all gone. Suddenly the wind had whipped up and gale force winds made everything shudder. My colleague looked at the forecast and panicked. There are going to be gusts of up to 342 miles an hour! Fifty is dangerous – how will we cope with 342? It’s a hurricane! Bunkers, everyone! I pointed out that the official Met Office forecast was for gusts twenty miles an hour, and that perhaps there had been an error on the website she was looking at. Oh.

It mightn’t have got to 342mph but the wind did pick up and sent more gusts of bright leaves swirling prettily. It whipped the branches so constantly that soon the colour was gone, turning the leaves into a brief carpet of yellow that changed too quickly into a carpet of brown. The odd staunch latecomer tree maintained its show; outside our window one of the trees stoically held onto its show of yellow berries against gorgeous red leaves. But there were more and more bare branches.

When November arrived the sunshine held on for a few days, but a week in, wild autumn weather has arrived. Rain and wind have settled in for the week and the nights are closing in early. By four each day it is dull and dusky, and darkness arrives all too early. Although its not yet very cold, winter is on its way.