Overtaken by Autumn

After almost exactly a month of whirling about, concentrating on the office move http://www.le.ac.uk/ms/news/newhomeafter.html working on the designs for this year's Leicester Children's Holiday Centre (Mablethorpe) charity Christmas Card, visiting Venice, and now getting ready for the new academic year, I've come back to the blog to find that we have been overtaken by Autumn....

How do I know? There are bales of hay in all the local farm fields (and a strong, rich smell of muck, following the cut!)

The chestnuts are coming on a treat. Hopefully, there will be a better crop than last year when we were so disappointed when the chestnuts developed early because of the damp and lack of sun. Most had no nut inside, and those that did went rotten on the tree.

M's bramleys are full and ripening - we had apple and blackberry pie for Sunday lunch today, with blackberries picked a couple of weeks ago from across the road.

The blackberries are almost over, though our son says he has plenty in his back gerden. Of course, at the risk of repeating myself, it's no use thinking of picking blackberries after next week. http://livingvillage.blogspot.com/2008/09/blackberries-have-more-vicious-friends.html

The last of the strwberries and raspberries are in the farmers' market, and by the time the next one comes round, they'll have gone,

There are always some picturesque visitors as the Summer comes to its close...

Though I think he was moved on rather quickly.

Anyone know what this is? I've been all through Keble Martin and I can't find it. Anyway, it's another sign that Autumn's here.

One of the more obvious signs of Autumn is the start of the Remembrance season. For thoseof you who are used to the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month", it might come as something of a surprise that Remembrance starts on this Sunday towards the end of September. It is, of course, the memorial of the Battle of Britain which saved Britain from the Luftwaffe and from subsequent invasion in 1940.

The memorial service took place in the Church of St James the Greater in Leicester, a 'Goddard' Church. There are few Victorian or Edwardian churches in the Midlands that weren't designed with at least some elements of the Gothic style, and this is one of the few. The Italian Renaissance style can be attributed to Henry Goddard's trips to Italy which produced sketch books full of ideas. (quote from http://www.le.ac.uk/emoha/leicester/goddardchurches.html)


Though these photographs do not really do it justice, it's easy to see the the influence of the great cathedral of Torcello in the Venetian lagoon, especially in features such as the pulpit, though all these features in Goddard's church are made in terracotta - more endearing than stone.