And so the year turns

The cherry tree failed to produce a single fruit this year, ditto the pear which admittedly surpassed itself last year with a veritable orchard's worth on its own, and the apples have been poor. The plums - those that were not hijacked by wasps - were good, but yet again the hedgerows are where the real treasure is to be found.

I have been on my first brambling expedition of the year this evening. One bag for me, one bag for next door and ten stung and scratched fingers. The bramble and apple crumble, which I intend to smother in custard, will be worth it though.

Little gold and striped spiders have spun their webs in the bramble bushes and I felt guilty when I accidentally knocked one from his home. In the morning the webs will dazzle with dew.

The arrival of spun silk in the hedgerows adds to the whiff of autumn. The Grey Mare is readying herself for winter too and is starting to look slightly fluffy.

I remember summer. It's just a shame it hasn't deigned to delight us with its presence for a couple of years.

Fly away

Swallows are, I think, my favourite birds. I love everything about them: their first appearance, swooping low over the fields, signalling that summer’s around the corner; their cream chests and rosy cheeks; the athleticism of the adults in their aerial arcs; the cherubic babies with their wide mouths in an ever-present grin.

But this ridiculous hotchpotch of weather has conned some couples into breeding again, leaving it dangerously late for their brood to build up the strength for their long journey to Africa. The one good thing about this year’s plague of flies is that they still have plenty to eat. But time isn’t on their side; just last week the brood living in the bottom corner stable was fluffy and soft. Expecting them to make the trip to warmer climes would be like asking a toddler to run the London Marathon. I feared for their future.

I went to look at them tonight. The babies of last week were gone; perched on the beams were little navy coated adults. Suddenly, like a flurry of fallen leaves caught up in a gust of wind, four or five of them were dancing in the air, swooping amid the rafters to show me what they could do.

I hope the weather is kind. I really hope they make it.

On the cusp

Suddenly, this week, the scent of autumn is in the air. The vividness of summer is gone; the landscape has lost its lush texture and is brittle and fading, the sky is a backdrop of washed-out chambray with a handful of painted, far-away clouds. The light is amazing but is gone shortly after 8pm. We are on the cusp between seasons.

The summer weather has not been kind. It has not been a vintage year of memories in the sun. When I shut the door on it this year, it won’t be with regret; rather I am ready for the new season and won’t be looking over my shoulder at the summer that never was.

But the wheel of the year is turning and its cycle is on time. The hedges are stuffed with a glut of glossy brambles, the crab apples are starting to appear, the sloes are beginning to colour on the blackthorn. Our plum tree and cherry tree have been a disappointment but the apple trees and especially the pear tree are groaning under the weight of their fruit. My fridge is packed with courgettes, cucumbers and tomatoes – little red and yellow jewels - from my dad’s greenhouse. Soon, I will start to think about making chutney and sloe gin.

Tonight, the beach was lonely, the sea turquoise and still, and the stubble fields stood empty, their gates open and inviting. The Grey Mare loves this time of year too.

Summertime blues

We are quite blessed with the weather in this little coastal pocket of Northumberland. Thanks to the salty air, it’s never too hot or too cold. Snow rarely sticks around for very long and the baking heat they allegedly sometimes feel inland is tempered by the breeze. I’m thankful, too, that we haven’t had the floods that have done more than simply ruin summer in some parts of the country. But I can’t help feeling cheated.

Already, the long, lush verdant grass is gone; in its place are yellowing stalks and dry heads of seed. Look closely, and the red berries are starting to appear in the hedges and the first flush of ripe brambles, deep and black, are dotted amid the thorns. The fields are turning to gold; tractors are trundling along the lane. Soon, the swallows will stop swooping after flies and gather on the telegraph wires ahead of their long journey to Africa.

The thick, creamy skies of June and July with their texture of shiny blue gloss paint have gone. Instead, the blue is now a watercolour wash; at least when it’s not a swirling dark mass carrying the threat of thunder. There is a nip of autumn in the air and the nights are drawing perceptibly in.

To paraphrase my Dad, if that’s our summer, we’ve had it…

School's out

At this time of year, I wish I were a primary school teacher. How I would adore six weeks free from the daily grind … then I remember that I’m not particularly fond of children (I wish some of my teachers had had the decency to consider that fact when choosing their careers) and that actually, primary school teachers work damn hard. Probably.

In truth, I haven’t had the freedom of a six-week stretch of summer holidays since I was 13. The holidays between leaving middle school and going up to the scary high school were bookended by a week at an aunt’s and a week with a friend at her grandparents’. In the middle was the heaven of other people’s horses, sea and sand; days of fresh-air tiredness, of appetites sharpened by salty air and satisfied by guilt-free fish and chips.

After that, my summer holidays were spent working. I worked in a green grocer’s, where I learned to count the correct change into people’s hands; I worked in shop, where I learned it was politic to wait until the foul-smelling person left before blasting the air freshener; I worked in a chippy, where I learned to tell the difference between haddock and cod; I worked in an hotel, where I learned chefs enjoy a pint and making a mess, but are far too important to clear up after themselves.

Overall, I learned that, like children, I’m not overly keen on tourists and the service industry was not for me. I learned that if wanted something more out of life, I’d better get me an education. Then one day, pallid, indoor teenagers may be waiting on me as I enjoyed my moment in the sun.

The sting

It would appear that I have squatters. There is a crack in the eaves where I have spied wasps hovering then disappearing. I don’t like the thought of wasps in my roof. I don’t like the thought of wasps full stop. They will have to be dealt with.

I don’t like the concept of killing anything, least of all suffocating a whole town of creatures with poisonous gas. I am not Saddam Hussein. However, I will make an exception when it comes to wasps. Wasps are evil.

I had no problem with them until the age of 19 when I was stung for the first time. I had been swimming in a water-filled quarry in the Malvern Hills and was sitting eating a Nutella sandwich. A wasp decided it wanted some of my lunch and refused to go away. I ran off with my sandwich; it chased me and stung me on my bare back below my shoulder blade. It felt as though someone had dropped the end of a lit cigarette on my defenceless flesh.

That was when I declared war on wasps. A traveller I picked strawberries with summed them up perfectly: “Wasps are the skinheads of the insect nation; they have no purpose other than going round beating people up.”

Bees are a totally different proposition. Fundamentally, unlike a wasp that can – and will - jab away willy-nilly, a bee has to have the mentality of a suicide bomber to sting you. Besides, how can something that creates a substance as luscious as honey mean any harm? There are numerous deep orange-bottomed bumble bees feasting on the flowering clover in the Grey Mare’s field at the moment. Many a time I have fished bumblers out of the water trough on sticks, and left them to dry on the fencepost.

I wouldn’t do that for a wasp. I’d hold it under.

If there's a bustle in your hedgerow ...

The weather gods may have forgotten that we are supposed to be sizzling amid a globally-warmed June, but at least the hedgerows know their place in the world order. As the Grey Mare and I meander around the quiet back lanes, she snatches surreptitious mouthfuls of frothy cow parsley from the verge and I gaze at the cornucopia of plants jostling for space in the hedges.

At the moment, the hedgerows are at their very best: stuffed with pink dog roses, red and yellow honeysuckle, and the various hues of different green shrubs. One year, I spotted gooseberries; when I returned in the car, I couldn’t find them again. Later, more obvious fruits will appear: a sprinkling of purple brambles, then a scattering of scarlet hips and the occasional half-hidden handful of green crab apples as we move towards autumn.

Our route often takes us over a disused railway line, now choked with long grass and weeds of triffid proportions – all the better to hide the occasional rubbish that fly-tippers think no one will ever notice. There are plenty of things to be seen from horseback that you would never register speeding past in a car. Growing amid the tall trees at the side of the abandoned track is a pear tree that produces a few golden, out-of-reach fruit each year. I often wonder who tossed that pear core from a train all those years ago.

Mists and mushrooms

There is something radically wrong with the wheel of the year. It appears some wag has given it a shove and it has skipped summer altogether. Why else have we been shrouded in mist, soaked with continual downpours and chilled with temperatures that forced me out of bed at 1am to seek tea and thermal socks? Circumstantial evidence, perhaps, but it’s the mushrooms that swing it for me.

A glut of mushrooms appears in the Grey Mare’s field towards the end of August each year: buttons, pink and brown-gilled field mushrooms, the occasional flat horser, as big as a steak, and sometimes a puffball, divine sliced and fried in butter. But they’re here already, admittedly in much sparser quantities, yet still sufficient to pick a couple of handfuls each night.

In our pre-packaged world, there is something deeply satisfying about eating something you have found, gathered, prepared and cooked. I risk scratched arms, snagged and sticky-budded sleeves and purple fingers to retrieve glistening brambles from the hedge, so I can savour the custard-coated crumble later. I clamber onto wobbly fences and avoid stout, sharp thorns to reach the best sloes, which will be combined with gin to be sipped in the glow of Christmas and on crisp hunting mornings. Plums and apples are collected from the garden to create chutney to accompany Stilton on thick buttered bread.

No, I have no quarrel with autumn; I just wish we’d had summer first.

A boxful of memories

My very first memory is of standing in a garden surrounded by flowers. The flowers were taller than I was. It was the garden where I learned to walk. I drive passed it most days.

There is another house and garden that lives in my box of memories that I also see daily. I never lived there but I yearned to. I still do; I have fleeting daydreams of what it will be like when it is mine.

Watching the wind ripple through the young corn today took me back to sitting on a wall at the edge of that garden, gazing at gusts eddying and flowing through the green wheat. In the spring, the wind in that garden shook the catkins on the pussy willow trees and made the bluebells dance.

In the heat of childhood summers, we would walk waist deep in the round pond, avoiding goldfish and shuddering as the cold mulch squished between our toes. There were tiny, periwinkle blue flowers on the rockery and pansies with gaudy faces. Beyond that grew gnarled crab apple trees where once I spied a lady with a pink crinoline and parasol that no-one else saw.

The greenhouses were warmed by metal pipes, where fat, brown toads lived among the powerful, earthy scent of tomato plants and geraniums. Inside the house, an Aga constantly supported a bubbling pan, while a smoky grey cat purred on the hearth of a giant stone fireplace.

Hidden behind the curtain and sitting on the window seat, I would look across the fields to the sea in the early summer. The sunlight sparkled and pirouetted on the calm surface like a separate entity. Outside, roses climbed a trellis on the wall.

When it’s mine, I won’t change a thing …