ELECTION TIME

This has nothing to do with elections at all. I am seeing if I can drum up some interest in my blog by giving it a   contemporary title and fooling people into coming here. Unless you are my family I guess it worked!

I am not a lover of Autumn. Like most things you worry about in life, once your there it is not as bad as you feared. My association with Autumn and sadness I think stems from my youth. September meant the end of the summer holidays and the start of school. I didn't like school. later in life September brought the curtain down on the Cricket season. In my "Yoof" I was a keen player. In fact it would be fair to say my life revolved around it. I was either playing, practising or ringing round my limited number of contacts in a desperate, last minute attempt to field a full team for Saturday. All my other players having been filched by the 1st or 2nd team to plug the gaps in their outfits. I loved it. 

But September brought it all to a grinding halt. There was nothing for it but to spend more time with whichever girlfriend I was with at the time. Doh!

There were compensations I decided in the end. In fact days like today. The sun was out but a mist hung in the valley. I have only been privileged to see this on no more than 3 occasions in my life. 

Not sure if either pic does the scene justice. You see, although I took my super-duper all singing, all dancing camera with me on my hike I had managed to fit not one but two dud batteries into the thing and all I got was   this picture before the whole thing shut up shop

Seeing as I left the house just after 2 the sun was already on it's last final farewell before trotting around for another go in the morning. But the advantage of this time of year is the the shadows are long and it seems like a 2 hour sunset. 

So I mentioned I had only seen this twice before. 

The first time was when I was a student at a now defunct (Shameful story) agricultural college in South Devon called Seale-Hayne. Ah now there are some stories. Anyway I had some lodgings in a holiday let on the edge Dartmoor and one morning we all gathered to look down the valley, shortly before we took the longish journey into college, and cooed over a valley apparently full to brimming with some cotton wool like substance. 

The second time was some years after that when I went for a short trip to that magical valley I mentioned some weeks ago. By that stage My Dad had given up the fishing there, apparently retirement proved that he no longer had such a great need to escape everyday life. Anyway we went for a drive up into the Cambrian mountains for want of something to do. It was a foggy day but as we rose up in altitude so it cleared. We parked the car and had one of those precious Father/Son moments when we both reveled in a new sight. That of a few scraggy mountains peeping out of an overcoat of cloud.

Magic