Rosehips, haws and crab apple jam: site editor Diva Harris and her long, thin dog walk (and eat) through the blazes of late autumn.
Ground cover/branch cover: Rosehip, haw, and all kinds of berry. Cornflowers, buttery mushrooms, ginkgo leaves like dropped butterfly wings.
We return from Japan, where the autumn we hungered for was delayed, and find ourselves held upside down. England is crisp and orange; the trees crackling with the flames of senescence. We swap shorts and mosquito bites for jumpers and the looming threat of ticks. We swap toy breeds with round haircuts for our heart-ruling hound — a dog from a medieval tapestry — aerodynamic and tufted as an arrow as she weaves through the acid-bright trees, scouting for deer.
We eat toast spread with crab apple jam at my in-laws’ refectory table. It has not been a great year for apples. We pull the inevitable ticks from the dog and burn them in the wood-burner. We ask if she has been well-behaved and the answer is Yes! Well — except for the stolen box of eggs, fresh from the honesty stall, flung in glee, catapulted from the cardboard nest, albumen spilt and breakfast derailed. We have always generously thought of her as having joie de vivre.
We light a big bonfire in the field, talk about marking seasons, the dark half of the year. We eat hot dogs with onions and wet the head of the newest babe. Our eldest niece toasts marshmallows on the fire with a long toasting fork. Here with B’s half of the family, with access to vast woodlands, securely fenced empty fields, and the dog’s best friend in the world, dog walks can be more loosely defined, the dogs free to roam and jostle; sometimes rocketing after the rabbits whose warrens pockmark the field boundary, and sometimes coming to lie by our feet, sighing as they warm their flanks by the fire. Sausages and marshmallows notwithstanding, it feels primal: we talk about how humans have been sitting by the fire in canine company for thousands of years.
We swap the circular dog tag, engraved with both sets of parents’ addresses, for the rhombus engraved with our own. We swap darkness that means owls and hedgehogs and a clear view of Cassiopeia for darkness that means wind-up-merchant foxes and teenagers lobbing fireworks. It takes a bit of time to settle back into our usual routine; for the dog to become reacclimatised to the ever-present sounds of trains, planes and backfiring boy-racer exhausts.
There is hot news waiting for us in the cold park. The council have decided to stop locking the gates in order to save money on overtime. They have taken down the laminated signs which tracked the gate closure time through its 15 minute changes, instead urging people to leave “when the park closes” at dusk. There is a confusing QR code which links through to a confusing byelaw document. I am caught between feelings of freedom and fear: the council are increasingly skint and cutting corners; the park is not well lit: conversely, I am not someone who is good at forward-planning, and will no longer have to climb out of a hole in the fence when I have been overly optimistic with my time. A fellow walker — whose dog has ear tufts and a beard to rival ours’, and the name of a middle-aged man — sensibly suggests that no miscreant was likely to have taken much notice of a locked gate anyway; particularly considering the fairly commonly-known-about gaps in the railings.
The weather takes a turn for the Wizard of Oz, the wind riling up dogs in Tellytubby-toned fleeces and blowing down a choice selection of big sticks. The last funguses of the season stick to trunks like chewing gum under school desks. We swap walking boots for neoprene-lined wellies; hats for balaclavas: our cotton underwear for merino thermals.
We swap bread and crab apples for crumpets and labneh and sour cherry preserve. We swap orange for grey; November for December: late autumn for early winter.
