Today is the last day of summer. Just so you can bring it to mind when you read this, I am writing on 5 September and the weather forecasters have told us with dour satisfaction that that’s it, today concludes our blast of heat and tomorrow and forever after, we will be feeling a lot colder.

So this morning I packed my children back off to a new term at school and set off to enjoy a walk to the Misbourne Valley whilst it was still cool. And it struck me that it was a pure, quintessentially English morning, such as we only get on the cusp of autumn. The fields were grey and obscured by a low mist and the elder trees heavy with purple berries. I lost count of the number of spider webs clinging delicately to a conifer hedge, their silk rimmed with dew. And there was that cool in the air that sharpens you, and doesn’t make you shiver. It was the most beautiful walk I have had this year.

Autumn is also coming to my garden which begins to look somewhat ragged, but the fruits of this season’s work are there – a greenhouse of slowly reddening tomatoes, huge round courgettes, yellowing butternuts, onions raising themselves out of the soil and apples weighing down the boughs of my small trees. There are more blackberries around than is polite in a cultivated garden, but they’ll be nice in pies, and I am sure to get around to taking out the brambles....soon.

I’m rather a slapdash gardener, and any success is more down to luck than any skill, but nevertheless it’s lovely to see the changing of the seasons in my garden and reflected in the wider world. We’ve had a great summer, and autumn will be truly lovely too.

Article - Buckinghamshire Advertiser - Summer 2013

Ho, hum, the weather, eh? Can’t live with it – can’t live without it. Last year, I had an almost total crop failure. I don’t count slugs as a crop and they were the only thing prospering in my garden, the merchant bankers of my veg patch, growing fat and smarmy at the cost of everything else. The only unexpected saving grace was that I had a bumper, late crop of tomatoes – by November the vines were sagging, weighed down with huge quantities of very green tomatoes which I harvested, put in brown paper bags to ripen and then feasted off as they reddened throughout the winter. Oh, I loved the pretention of serving luscious scarlet tomato salad to friends in January saying – ‘help yourselves – they’re from our garden, you know’. ‘No!’ ‘Oh yes!’

Things aren’t a whole lot better this year. Everything’s late, but at least it’s not so wet (and by the time you read this, we may well be deep into an August drought). But it’s ok. It’s not a matter of life or death; if my harvests fail, I’ll pop to the supermarket or see what local farmers have managed to drag up through the soil.

But. What if the timing of the seasons really matters to you? What if my family was relying on what I could grow in my garden? What is happening in other areas of the world where the increasing unpredictability of weather is making subsistence farming increasingly fraught? As an Oxfam report on Tajikistan sets out, climate change ‘is affecting agriculture... and threatening the food security of thousands of people who depend on small-scale subsistence farming for their survival. Intense droughts, extensive flooding and increased frequency of weather-related shocks are becoming more apparent, and hitting poor people hardest’.

So when the birds get into my strawberries, or I’m complaining about my wrinkled beetroots, paucity of cucumbers and brussel sprouts that promise much but deliver little– I’ll try to put my lot in that context.


Oxfam reference – ‘Climate change: Beyond coping. Women smallholder farmers in Tajikistan’ .

Atmospheric Anger

I have this idea about anger. It's like global warming. Really, it is. We all feel it, we don't take responsibility for it or try hard enough to control it and then it heats and distorts the environment, first on a local level and then globally. There are, of course, lots of things about which to get angry. Some righteously, some randomly. When people get angry, their behaviour is then predicated on this emotion. I'm saying people; I am so including myself here. I react with anger automatically.

Actually, 'automatically' is a bit of a cop out - it's by choice, if I'm not going to let myself off the hook. It's just that it happens so fast that I don't intercede. I could step in and change my behaviour. And anger begets anger. I start mouthing through my windscreen at some twit who has cut me up, and they start throwing the 'v' signs and feeling self-righteous. Neither of us steps back to think whether there is another way of dealing with this situation.

And then all this anger rises up in a poisonous cloud which heats up the atmosphere and nobody started it and everyone is used to it so we all live with it and don't know how to change and can't get a corporate movement started to make change happen. And anger, just like fossil fuel use, is hard-wired into our society. For instance, we watch soap operas on telly where nobody listens to anyone else but scowls and snorts and relationships collapse, and then we listen to Today in Parliament and it's the same but with posher accents and worse actors. And journos shock us with more and more violent stories because they're not getting the outraged reaction often enough, and sometimes they even tell us that we are angry when we didn't realise we were....and then we are shocked and saddened that people are killing each other in far off lands.... Only we are doing the same here.

Stress kills people, anger destroys, knives are pulled out more readily and with less cause. I guess that we still tolerate it as it feels at more manageable levels and for most of us, not in our immediate community. There are a few voices raised about it but really it's seen as someone else's problem.

Which is funny, because that's exactly how we feel about global warming in this country. Not our problem, affects people far away, and only marginally us, and we're not a global community, so let's close the door and cuddle up and donate something to Comic Relief and then that's fine. Bollocks. Oops, there I go again.