It's beginning to feel a bit like autumn.

Driving home through the park the other day I saw the leaves on the horse chestnuts were beginning to colour and fall, but then they are always early turners.  Then some adverts came through the door featuring new pens, tracksuits, books and schoolbags.  Ah well, I thought, they are getting a bit ahead of themselves it's still midsummer really.  And then I woke up to lashing rain, a gale blowing, the beginning of the last week of the holidays and the realisation  that autumn is barging its way into the end of summer.

When the storm abated and we were left with a quickly chagable sky and that swirly wind that has just a hint of an autumn sting we donned raincaots and gumboots and ventured off down a track that we had never tested before.  There was a reason for this, firstly we had been told "it just goes to the fields" secondly it is not adapted for pushchair wheels  - and thirdly I needed to wait until all the family's little legs had grown into bigger legs to go adventuring down strange tracks! This has all meant 10 years of driving past the track never knowing that although it does just go to the fields it also goes there for a long way through beautiful coutryside.  We cycled through puddles, past boulders, through ferns, over a stone bridge and through  a wood.  It also had the biggest juiciest blackberries that we have found.  We ate many and collected more and then thoroughly mud-stained and hands and faces smeared a deep purple we returned just before the storm attacked again.  

The afternoon was spent making pear and blackberry jam (from this marvellous recipe here. )  then ordering in the wood for the fire and the hay for the donkpon.  I have decided to embrace my favourite season even though it appears to be muscelling in on my summer a little early this year.