Kevin Parr on a 2025 of high winds and topsy-turvy seasons.
It was a Sunday morning in mid-November when autumn finally broke. A jet-stream flicker brought an Arctic shove, behind which rose a periwinkle sky and low sun streaming through the French windows. The cyclonic cycle had been welcome when it broke the summer drought but then lingered too long. It wasn’t that someone had left the tap running, more that they’d left the immersion on, steaming up the mirrors and thickening the soup. We were lighting the fire to dry the washing and fight the damp, sitting in t-shirts while outside the cloud rolled up from Chesil like smoke billowing from a bonfire of damp leaves.
We were back in the limbo of summer, only without the sun. Waiting once more for the shift — but what to do while we wait? The ox-eye daisies decided to come back into flower, while the frogs returned to the little pond by the garden gate. At night, they croaked in conversation as though it was early spring, while inside we struggled for sleep, lying beneath a sheet in November, our duvet that hug of cloud outside the window.
I was missing my routine, the ritual of walks that I tread each autumn. I particularly love the seasonal shift in the meadows at Kingcombe. There, in early September, small coppers and common blues still dance across the yarrow and knapweed, the leaves on the oaks only just beginning to brown. The change, week on week, is as smooth and inevitable as the diminishing arc of the sun. The pattern is reassuring, as flowers fade so waxcaps begin to glow among the green. There comes the vast ring of parasols in New Grafs Meadow and the steadily emergent skeleton of the single oak in Redholm. This year, though, went topsy-turvey. An early flush of fungi folded in the damp warmth, ceding to a churn of buttercups and dandelions. The grasses plumped and greened and the scorched soil saturated. In Redholm, the parasols sunk into oily dollops, while in the garden a blackbird joined the song thrush in full song.
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The break brought frost and fieldfare as the soup cleared to consommé and steam curled off the backs of the cows. I was back in The Cairngorms, in the summer before this one, wondering if I was actually breathing or whether the air was so pure that it simply seeped through my pores. On the Monday, I walked the meadows until they dissolved into the dusk, crunching though the shadows and savouring the still. Autumn arrived abruptly, yet I was able to absorb the essence in a single afternoon. Just in time for the first bite of winter that followed later that week, though we avoided the snow of elsewhere.
A fortnight on and we are back into the cyclonic cycle, sitting once more in a t-shirt as Storm Bram batters the windows and floods the lanes. And what I must not do is long again for the break. It is a response incompatible with contentment, and little wonder that so many of us are wondering where the year went — we wished a lot of it away.
I am one of those people who struggles with change, although sometimes come those moments that remind us that change doesn’t have to be bad. It was the Wednesday following my Monday meadowland walk, and Sue and I were sitting in the lounge as the world drifted outside the windows. The wind, though light, still came from the north and was pushing up the ridge opposite, giving perfect lift for the ravens to ride. Then came the sighting we’ve been expecting for several years. ‘What is that?’ Sue asked, although we both knew the answer. Our minds still worked through the process of probability before rationality brought confirmation. It couldn’t be anything else.
G818, I later learned, a female white-tailed eagle that fledged in 2021. Some people dismiss the Isle of Wight released birds as ‘plastic’, but there was nothing artificial about my emotions in the then and there. Yes, I’ll asterisk the sighting in my notebook, (species number 101 on the garden list), but I’ll never forget the moment.
