Authors Electric

Seriously, is there anyone who doesn't like Autumn? There are those who puff and pant their way through summer complaining about the heat, or who like me dread the dreariness of winter with its cold feet and chilblains - ugh! And however lovely spring can be, how many days of it do we usually get between the blizzard and the heat-wave? On our wedding day in Scotland it actually snowed -  and that was in April. But autumn! I feel a collective sigh of appreciation going round. Even for those without a personal orchard, mellow fruitfulness can be found in abundance in the hedgerows: - sloes, damsons and blackberries. Scavenging - we love it! Then there's that feeling of pleasant wistfulness that goes with misty mornings and low sun through the trees as one year dwindles into another.  Kick those leaves and light those fires. Autumn perpares us for what is to come - soon I might be ready for hygge after all. All these meanderings were brought on by our trip on Satu...

Sunrise, North Bay, Scarborough, Summer 2015 For me, March 1 st is the first day of Spring. When we lived in Edinburgh, that was the day the sun first used to graze the edge of our kitchen cupboards before setting. Next day, the thin band of golden light would be a little wider, next day wider still, reassuring us that summer was on the way (always assuming, of course, that there were no clouds – but I don’t remember a single year of not seeing the sun fall on our cupboards on that date). Where I live now, we don’t have sunshine-on-the-cupboard day, though we do have something I like to call sunshine-up-the-plughole day, in spite of my other half’s assuring me that the sun is not really shining up the plughole. It certainly looks as though it is, which is what matters to me. It’s not on Mar 1 st either – it’s sometime in April and again in August – so it doesn’t signify Spring in the same way but it’s better than nothing. In Scarborough, on the Yorkshire coast, wh...

If no one had said 'Spring's here! ', if I’d not been able to see the light and the primroses and hear the birds shouting, I'd still have known. Spring! What a good word for it!   Today I sprang out of bed at 6am and,  eschewing the usual slorming about in my pjs until after the post’s arrived,  sprang through my ablutions and into my clothes. Primped, prepped and ready.  ‘What’s got into you?’ asked my partner. ‘Are you going somewhere?’  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘It’s just that I want to be ready. I don’t know what for, I just do.’    Did he know something we don't know?  Deep in the limbic Neanderthal recesses of my brain, something stirred, a bright blood compulsion to clean out my nest, and my thoughts and my life, to make all clean, clear and fresh again.        Do you suffer from SAD? Seasonal Affective Disorder. Disorder? Really? But, isn't this alteration from low to high spirits, as the year moves from wint...