Wednesday 3rd August – We go back to nature

Today has been glorious.  A real, proper, Autumn type day.  The sun has shone in a cloudless blue sky.  It has been crisp instead of humid or freezing.  There has been no rain.  It was beautiful.  Autumn is my favourite time of year.  Seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness and all that (the first poem I ever learned).  I like it because it smells nice and it looks pretty.  I love that slightly musty, things are dying but it’s kind of cool smell.  It’s a faint reminder of mortality, but more artistic than watching a plane crash or someone fall under the wheels of an oncoming bus.  It allows one to feel melancholy but in a well earned sort of way.

Autumn is one of the big things I would miss if we ever moved abroad.  I only want to move somewhere where they have Autumns I approve of.  This limits our options somewhat as the whole of the rest of the family wants to move to Las Vegas and live in a swimming pool.  Still, as we have about ninepence to our name and I have no portable skills that will make us millions of dollars we shall be staying here and not worrying about it.

Anyway, back to our Autumnal morning.  I decided that after Oscar had had his morning fix of Wallace and Gromit (A Close Shave today.  He is falling in love with Shaun) we would go out.  I would take him to the village church and let him romp about in the church yard climbing trees, inspecting gravestones and hitting things with sticks.  It is a very pretty church, set on a slight hill with an older, ruined, ivy clad church in the grounds which makes it all gothicky and exciting.  There are lots of brambles and ditches and other such horrible terrain that small boys love.  It’s an ideal place for a brisk Autumn forage.  We could pretend to be squirrels and I could further induce my enjoyable melancholy by reading all about the hideously early deaths of the Victorian population of Glenfield and their tubercular ways.  I proposed my idea to Oscar who immediately signed up and went and fetched his trainers.

We wandered down to the church, stopping in at the post office on the way to purchase some juice and a packet of emergency Rolos.  We got out of the Post Office and thought that there might be an imminent emergency so we had a Rolo each for good karma.  Once we were there I hoiked Oscar out of his buggy and let him free.  He scuttled up to one of the gravestones, hit it feebly with a stick and then demanded to get back in the buggy and have some mink.  This is not normal small boy behaviour.  I was, at the very least, expecting to be thrown out of the grounds by the Church warden for some mindless toddler vandalism.  I was a bit depressed.  I tried to jolly him along by pointing out some stunning gravestones and the horribly early death of someone called Ida who was now sleeping soundly.  He was not keen.  I gave in and handed over the mink.

Determined that we would continue our nature ramble, albeit in an unorthodox, ‘me doing all the rambling (nothing new there) way,’ we scuttled about the grass, weaving between headstones in the buggy.  We found some spectacular brambles and Oscar tried his first blackberry.  He was immensely keen and sat up with one hand outstretched and the other shovelling berries into his mouth as fast as I could pick them.  When he had an empty enough mouth he uttered the words ‘More! More!’ with juice dribbling down his chin.  After twenty minutes and about half a kilo of blackberries I put my foot down on the grounds that there would be hell to pay later as it was.  By then he had a black tongue, his hands were purple and I was scratched and sticky.  We did our best with a couple of baby wipes but it didn’t look good.  It wasn’t at all aesthetic and there was nothing to compare it to the Seamus Heaney poem, aptly called something like ‘blackberry picking’.  Our poem was something more like massacre at blackberry time, written in blackberry juice on flesh.

After his snack I suggested he might want to get out of his buggy and explore. He disabused me of that notion by putting his feet up on the buggy bar at the front and relaxing.  I suggested we go home.  This was promptly vetoed. He wanted more walk.  He wanted more nature.  He just didn’t want to actively participate.  He wanted nature to be brought to him while he bestrode his triumphant chariot.  We looked at some plants and hedges, some spiders and some bees.  He got very excited about the bees.  We watched a bee collecting pollen from some mallow flowers the other day and he was fascinated.  When we saw the bees this morning he sat up and started doing what he told me was a ’bee dance’ in his buggy.  This mainly consisted of him wiggling his head and shoulders in a very Stevie Wonder like way.  It made me think that maybe the reason I was never very keen on Stevie Wonder was due to the fact that all this time he had been trying to communicate with bees and that his music wasn’t for human consumption after all.  We stared at streams, we wandered about some footpaths.  Then I got tired of nature.  We went to the Co-op so that I could buy Heat magazine.  That cheered me up.

We got home.  Oscar wanted to watch In the Night Garden.  I wanted lunch.  He refused lunch.  He watched In the Night Garden while I ate half a French stick.  I put him to bed shortly thereafter and he’s still there, much to my amazement.  Maybe he should have teeth/pox more often.  It makes for a very quiet life.  I should be scrubbing blackberry juice off the hall floor.  I’m thinking about it.

I have to say that I am a little disappointed that he wasn’t a bit more enthusiastic about my lovely nature plans.  I am trying very hard to be more outdoorsy and pro active as a mother.  This is much against my natural instinct which is to curl up on the sofa with the remote control and the biscuit barrel.  Fresh air scares me.  It reminds me of my youth.  I’ve done fresh air and I was very good at it, but I have no real desire to go back there any time soon. As it is I’ve promised the kids they can make rock cakes when they get back from school.  I don’t know what’s come over me this week.  Rock cakes, paintings, splashing, walks in nature.  I wonder if the aliens in the Co-op have got to me after all?  It’s not like me is it?  Even my mother is getting a bit twitchy.  Hopefully it will wear off soon.

Tilly seems to be a little happier at school this week by the way.  She has two teachers and we are on teacher number two for this half of the week.  It appears to be a lot less stressful, which is good.  She also went home with one of her school friends for tea last night and came back happy because she had tried roller blading and run into a gatepost.  Apparently this was quite good for a first go.  I have to admit to being quietly envious.  I would like to have a go at roller blading myself, but only in the dark with nobody watching and pointing.  Perhaps I’ll take it up when I’m a pensioner.  I can sell my buspass for a set of blades and strike out.  As long as I wear some kind of hip padding I should be fine.  Something to look forward to in the Autumn of my life.  How apt.