First frost

A new friend? Perhaps. We've only known each other a month or two, C and I - not long enough to be comfortable labelling our tentative compatability a full-blown friendship. But we get on and she'd invited me for breakfast and that's a good start.

Her home is an old farmhouse about forty minutes walk away. By road it's quicker, but who would choose that option on a morning like this when you could instead follow the footpath across the meadows by the river? Muffled up in a giant parka, gloves and wellington boots, at just after eight a.m. I head east, tramping towards the rising sun.



It is very cold. The first frost of the winter, a translucent white coating, covers each and every blade of grass and every leaf, shrivels the remaining blackberries and temporarily renders muddy hollows rock-hard. Earth and grass are bleached to a near-monochrome and tiny crystals glint and refract the light. By now my nasal passages are tingling and the cold is starting to seep through the rubber boots. It's definitely a morning to keep on the move but I have to stop at intervals to take in this changed world.

Against the ice-blue sky streaked with thin clouds, a vapour trail, beautiful but lethal, streams out from a speck of an aircraft high, high overhead, and I wonder if the passengers waking from their unsatisfactory transatlantic doze are as dazzled by their early morning vista as I am by mine.

Apart from silent flow of the river, everything is still. The cattle that grazed these fields throughout the summer are long gone and mine are now the only tracks to be seen, animal or human.

As I head up the farm track towards C's house her black and white border collie rushes to the metal gate, barking a welcome.

....

A year ago I wasn't sure that I would be able to sell my London flat. I was temping in a financial boutique (yes, they do exist) in Victoria.

Sometimes I have to pinch myself. I am here.

More autumn photographs on my Flickr page.