Autumn Thoughts

High Peak in Autumn

I've always liked autumn. In just the same way as the ancients saw it as a time for taking stock of the Harvest and preparing for the cold, hard winter ahead, I'm using the season to fend off ill-health, unemployment and encroaching mortality, not in a negative way, but with the glow of experience and the embers of the past hopefully lighting the way. 

John Keats saw the fall season as a period of bounteous fecundity, a time of 'mellow fruitfulness', while the more melancholy W.B. Yeats saw it as the onset of winter ... where the dying greenery is a metaphor for one's own ageing. 

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,

And now my heart is sore.

All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,

The first time on this shore....

(WB Yeats,"The Wild Swans at Coole" )

I see nothing inconsistent in celebrating both viewpoints - the waning of the light and the glow of the winter eventide. I know as I approach the autumn of my own life - hopefully - that it is a time for both taking stock of failures, successes, mistakes and rare flashes of inspiration and maybe even the odd glimpse of wisdom. It's a bittersweet taste, like alternating the taste of candied apples with a fresh, tart cider.

I spent most of the thirty years I've been working in steady jobs, until I was forced home from London by ill health and general ennui. Since then, I have been unable to find permanent work. Except this isn't quite true. At first, I regarded this ill wind rather nervously, and took the only job I could find .... working interim. It was my first experience of being self-employed, and I didn't expect to last five minutes in an environment where I was expected to pick up unfamiliar workloads quickly and deliver projects that had - for whatever reason - failed to get off the ground. On five days' notice, I expected to last .... well, five days. But I didn't; I made a reasonable fist of it and ended up staying eight months when I'd only expected three months work. The same has happened three times now, and I've actually started taking the initiative ending my own employment. It feels different when you actually define your own seasons, I've found. You actually cease thinking about the fallow winter, and start thinking about new, fecund springs.

Far from autumn becoming a moribund time where shorter days and the onset of winter drive one's life force into the floor, I've found the challenges of the season refreshing, life-affirming, and ready for the winter.

I hope your autumn brings you the same positive changes.

Listen to: Angelique

The Age of the Bucket List

I've recently reached a certain age (50, if you're wondering). It's odd how an accident of decimal arithmetic makes one take stock of life, the universe, and everything. One's perceptions of time are based on: how much of it you have experienced; whether you have less of it to come than has flown under the bridge; and if you damn well want any more of the stuff after the experiences that you have been exposed to as a result of having lived through so much of it already.

In my case, one usual reaction in the case of a fairly average First World WASP is to think about all the places I have never been, and whether, with the experience of age, I would, in fact, still like to go to these places with the full power of 20:20 hindsight. In most cases, I've retained enough enthusiasm about the world, to say a resounding "yes" to most of them.

My rather prosaic bucket list, in summary, runs something like:

• Greenland - what can I say, I like cold, remote places. 
• Kabale, Uganda - I wish I could say this was due to erudite reading, but I saw it on Top Gear
• Transylvannia - no fetish for Vampires, but Romania fascinates me
• The Atacama Desert - this time, not due to Top Gear, but due to the lure of the Andes
• The Andes - an end to end tour of the 4,300m mountain range taking in Chile, Ecuador and Peru
• China - particularly The Great Wall
• New Zealand - particularly the Remarkables and Lindis Pass
• Rome - I've never been, and it's relatively close to my home in the UK (obviously not by bus)
• Iceland - the weird and wacky result of effusive volcanism - and the Northern Lights
• The Himalayas - I read "Lost Horizon" as a 12 year old and have wanted to visit Tibet, Nepal and Mongolia ever since.
• More of the UK - I was born here and have never seen the Western Isles, the far north of Scotland, nor the Orkneys and Hebrides. Despite knowing North Wales quite well, I've never been to South Wales.

So far, so predictable. Except I then realised that my focus over the years has moved to people. There are people I would like to meet that I have befriended via this vast virtual desert we call the Internet (or Internets in plural if you're G.W. Bush / have an IQ of 64, whichever applies).

I won't embarrass the people I would like to meet, but I've encountered some fascinating characters over the years out here I'd like to meet in the flesh. But I know I probably never will in most cases, rather like the places above, many of which I know I won't ever visit. I suppose the nice thing is, I'm sadder about the former than the latter these days. Places are there for longer than this fragile and fleeting thing we call a lifetime.

About time I started compiling my bucket list in order of surname, I think.