Those glorious days of a golden autumn

We were fortunate last week to have experienced some of these remarkable days, given that the default weather of the UK nowadays seems to be the constant state of spring-shower delivered with a great deal of mugginess and humidity.

Apart from fog, that is my least favourite kind of weather.

But these golden early autumn days are the ones to remember.

They offer the country-lover the opportunity to walk for miles and miles without perspiring too much - and you can march in the knowledge

Slight zephyrs are raised in the midday warmth so that the slowly dying leaves rustle sough and sing in the breeze, but apart from that the high-pressure in the atmosphere seems to highlight every birdsong better than the acoustics of the Royal Albert Hall.

You can hear the distant cockerel calling two miles away in the hamlet, you can hear the multitude of longtailed tits coursing through the hedgerows high on the escarpment, and you can hear the indeterminate motion of a mole that is wrecking your lawn beneath your office window.

Only the airliners coming in across the Atlantic Approaches from North America ruin the ambient silence such weather instils.

And you can see their vapour trails stretching for hundreds of miles up there in the metallic blue above the earth, its season turning, below.

When the Dreamliner has gone, you are left to your valley’s dark shadows and its silent preparation to turn the full autumn gold.

And you know that all is right and proper in your sunlit corner of heaven, underneath the vast endless heavens…