At one stride comes the ...autumn

First off, three apologies. 

For yielding yet again to the temptation to misquote a poem because it floated, unbidden, from the ragbag of my mind... (It's from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, if you're interested); for being too idle to make a choice of a single photo for the blip and settling for yet another collage; for being such a poor blip-friend to my valued circle on here and taking such a long time to get round to read other journals. For the last, I partly blame horrid dry eyes when I look too long at screens - especially in the evening - but it's an excuse nonetheless.

Autumn seems to have come so much in one stride as in a great, galumphing leap. Today. When I looked out this morning I saw a benign sky, the sun came out, my builders were pressing on with the new steps up the garden ... and now, sitting in the study, I can hear the wind howling slightly through the back garden (my poor late roses ...) and it's been raining since early afternoon. And it's not warm any more. And it was dark by dinnertime. 

This morning was quite full - I made bread, then two overlapping phone calls had me out after breakfast ferrying friends to the local hospital, picking my way carefully through the tarry, lumpy, raised-manholey chaos brought about by the council's decision to resurface the road onto which we drive from our lane. Home for a coffee (and to wash the dishes) before taking the chance of a walk while it was still dry. That's where I got the three photos - the amazing clump of whatever-they-ares at the foot of a tree, a lovely little new tree just turning, a leaf looking picturesque. 

Home for lunch, I let yesterday's activities catch up with me and dozed for some time over the insides of the Sunday paper. Then a mail from my #1 son alerted me to a five-minute sequence on a video of the last Spartans game featuring my older grandson, and I ended up watching the whole thing, including the spectacular rain that Edinburgh seemed to enjoy at some point on Sunday. I also annotated a set of photos on Flickr, and wasted quite a lot of time on a Sudoku. I tell myself it's keeping my brain going ...

Before dinner, I made myself do the physio exercises I should really do every day but often don't, and afterwards we had online Compline. Since then, I've dozed over the telly so that I only have the sketchiest of ideas about what's happening in the world and failed entirely to make any sense of what the weather's doing tomorrow.

Definitely time to give up on today...