The leaves cascade down.
Some are brown, some are gold, some are spiky, some are flat. Some fall
on my head as I sit at the keyboard. There’s been no rain for days, so the leaves
are as light as tissue paper and almost diaphanous in texture. There they lie on the patio, waiting for me
to sweep them up. I’ll have to put
gaffer tape round the handle of the yard brush, because the plastic is cracked and
the crack nips my hand. Come to think of
it, I could do with a new brush. This
one is so worn the bristles are about as long as George Michael’s stubble.
I’ve
prepared for winter. The cover is on the
bench, the garden table is dismantled and safely in the shed, and the chairs
are safe beneath the horse chestnut tree.
The garden hose is coiled like a giant slender snake and lies under the
table at the back of the garden upon which are kept the myriad plant pots that
are never used.
There are reminders of
autumn everywhere. I went for a walk
with the little black spaniel the other day, along the railway walk that used
to carry a branch line from Haddington to Longniddry. I joined it at Cottyburn, which was the only
halt on the line, where two people and a cat live, and I wondered why they ever
bothered having a halt there at all.
Halfway along the track I ran into the Bramble Man. He looked uncannily like Mr Jeremy Corbyn,
with his white chinstrap beard and spare physique. He was staring gloomily at a tangled skein of
blackberries. ‘They’re almost finished,’ he said. ‘I think I’m rather too
late.’ He was carrying a medium-sized tupper box and he was wearing a pair of
rubber gloves. ‘It’s the thorns,’ he said, answering my look rather than my
direct question. ‘The only good ones are deep in the bushes, and
these thorns would cut your hands to ribbons in no time.’
‘If you stay here
three hours you might have enough to make a pound of jam,’ I observed. He nodded glumly and turned his back on me to
resume his work. When I returned an hour
later he was still at it. His tupper box
was half full. ‘You’ll be stopping for
lunch?’ I asked him. ‘I’m nearly finished.
I’ve had enough. She can stew these and we’ll have them for tea with
custard.
I had to cook dinner that day,
and the Bramble Man reminded me of it. I
had a book of Rick Stein recipes. I also
had a couple of mackerel in the fridge.
Now I like mackerel, but it’s a dodgy fish because it’s so oily. Jeeves used to eat it all the time and it
developed his brain no end, but PG Wodehouse wrote nothing about the WD40 aftertaste
that lingers for hours. I had to find a
way to disguise that. I settled on a
recipe that Mr Rick calls mackerel with nasi goreng paste. You cook the mackerel, tear it into bits, add
a load of other ingredients including shrimp paste and roasted peanuts, make
some tiny omelettes, boil some rice, add some soy sauce, and throw the whole
lot into a smoking-hot wok and stir fry the concoction until it almost catches
fire. ‘What’s that?’ my wife said when I presented it to her. I told her it was one of Mr Rick’s best recipes.
‘It looks like a dog’s breakfast,’she said.
She added, ‘What are those burned black bits?’
‘They’re peanuts.’
‘I
can’t eat those, not with this toothache. What are those rubbery yellow lumps?’
'Omelette.’
‘Have you left the fish skin on?’
‘Of course, it’s the best bit of
the fish.’
She pushed away her
plate. ‘What’s for pudding?’ she said.
‘Stewed
blackberries and custard,’ I told her, drily.
