October

It was beautifully sunny, and as it's the start of a new month, I wandered round the garden photographing things which are flowering, fruiting or otherwise attractive or interesting so that I can make a collage. However, as I've not yet colllaged the photos from the first weekend in September, or found time to go through the many I took last Monday and decide which to use, I'm not sure when this will happen. I'm back to posting everything a day late too.

I enjoyed the garden wander, and also some more apple picking later, which took me right to the bottom of the orchard. Some of the trees have fruited well this year despite the drought, while others have produced no fruit at all. We are munching our way through lots of sweet and crunchy Discovery apples, and I'm stewing big bowls of odds and ends, a mixture of cookers and eaters, with sweet spices ready to eat with yoghurt or on my muesli or to pack into tubs for the freezer. The other particularly nice bit of the day was eating brunch with J, cheese omelettes and freshly baked bread with good coffee in the sunny dining room, while listening to Vaughan Williams' Sea Symphony. I first heard it echoing around the Norman pillars of Durham Cathedral in the 1980s, when I friend of ours was singing with the choral society; in the past few years P has acquired recordings of all his symphonies but I think this one and the Sinfonia Antarctica, also sung in the cathedral at another concert, have remained my favourites. I was thinking about them this weekend because the late night book on radio 4 has been an interesting account of Vaughan Williams' decades of work collecting folk songs in rural and coastal communities.