It wasn't easy to find suitable autumn colours to illustrate this post, but just below my balcony the late afternoon sun caught the golden leaves of a little maple tree. The hot sunny weather felt more like high summer than well into the autumn, and the leaves are slow to turn this October for the same reason. In past years I've often photographed the brilliant colours in our neighbourhood from our balcony and from ground level, always around this date. This year the combination of mild days and frosty nights hasn't happened; the day temperature dipped briefly a week ago, but so far this year we haven't had a frost; and this Thanksgiving weekend we have had a virtual heatwave. Yesterday Rebecca and Richard held a delightful family feast for David and Desre and Jonathan and me. It was warm enough for us to eat this out on their patio at dusk, and all around us others in that neighbourhood were having their feast out doors on their patios too. We exchanged greetings with Rebecca's next door neighbours; it was all very cosy and collegial, a small but delightful Thanksgiving feast. Today has been another hot day of blazing sunshine, and conditions have been similar all over the northern hemisphere. Last week temperatures in the southern half of England were in the low 30s and thousands of people went swimming in the sea. It's just another harbinger of the relentless advance of climate change or global warming, and by rights it should make us all tremble. But I think instead most people will feel as I did strolling in our little park, grateful for small mercies.
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