Last night was probably the last time that I’ll walk on the Common. We moved to Green Mount when I was 7, and I’m now 70, so that’s some kind of symmetry, I suppose. After a showery day, in early autumn, the atmosphere was suitably mildly melancholy. The bracken, twice my height when I was a kid, and with taller plants still reaching above my head, is turning colour. It’s still too early for spectacular fungi, but rainwashed haws and the gorse added splashes of colour. Windfall wild apples, smaller than golfballs, stand out against early-fallen leaves, and early acorns are falling, though most are still on the trees.
This morning was wrestling the second batch of furniture and family archive stuff from Green Mount over to Worcester. Not as easy as it sounds: the tall chest of drawers had to be partly dismantled in order to fit down the narrow spiral stairs. The van driver, who’d done my first batch of stuff back in February, was patient and helpful! Most of the stuff is now ensconced in the storage unit on the other side of the Severn, but I have a large landscape painting to hang, once my back has recovered enough to handle picture-hooks and stepladders.
