As the US sleepwalks to disaster (whoever wins next Tuesday) and Breakfast most certainly no longer means Breakfast, are you stupid or part of the liberal elite? Or possibly both? Or even neither?

Perhaps the good folk living on Rimatara don’t yet know it or perhaps they do know but don’t care, but the good folk here in the Western hemisphere look set to be in for a bumpy ride over the next few years, and quite possibly, depending upon what happens, and even bumpier ride of the next 40. Around five months ago, and by a whisker of a majority, the UK voters told the EU ‘look, it’s not you, it’s me, and I want out’ and that it was time both went their separate ways (though can the sex carry on?). And in four days we will find out whether the US has elected as its 45th president a man who can most charitably be described as the mother of all barroom lawyers, though apparently one with learning difficulties.

The departure of Britain from the EU, or ‘Breakfast’ as an increasing number of politicians and commentators have decided to call it, is old news and to a large extent the world - or at least most of us with an attention span shorter than that of a gnat - have moved on. The imminent collapse of civilisation as we know it that had been predicted by far, far too many Remainers (who really should have known better) didn’t happen, and though for fuckwittedness they were easily matched by assorted Brexiteers celebrating once again being able to stick one up Johnny Foreigner who within hours of the referendum result being published on June 24 began a chorus of ‘crisis what crisis?’

There were cheers in golf clubs and saloon bars up and down the country (though not in Scotland who these days take a contrary view on everything supported by the English) when the pound fell a great deal against the dollar, then fell a great deal more — before the vote on June 23 you could get $1.496 for your pound — as all those who voted to ‘regain control’, another of those vacuous phrases which sound great but begin to mean less and less the more you examine them.

Today, as I write, you can get just $1.244. I tried to work out the percentage fall, but after ten minutes have given up. I’ve never been good at maths.) Marvellous news, the Brexiteers cried, it means that our exports will go up and up and up and the economy will grow stronger and stronger and stronger. That imports will become dearer and dearer and dearer and everyday living will become ever more expensive is written off — if, indeed it is mentioned at all — as just one of those things and a reasonable price to pay for ‘regaining control’. (NB I realise that despite my best efforts, I have rather given away what I think about Breakfast, but I can assure you that what I feel about it is not at all straightforward. Here’s a teaser: although voted Remain, I wasn’t at all upset by the result. But more of that later.)

As for the coming US presidential election next Tuesday (November 8) it has so far been the accepted wisdom that being as Donald J Trump is a state-registered, card-carrying moron — and furthermore a moron who gives other morons a very bad name — Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democrat nominee will walk it. Until recently, the polls showed her substantially ahead and even though, apparently, Trump is these past few days on an equal footing, that is because someone somewhere is not playing fair: inexplicably just a week before the election the head of the FBI has reopened the investigation into ‘her emails’ and that has rather dampened the enthusiasm of some voters for seeing Clinton as the next US president. As I write Trump and Clinton are apparently neck and neck in the polls.

This election is widely being billed as a contest between ‘the two most unlikable people on Earth’, and given the proviso that there are a great more candidates for that position, it does neatly sum it all up. Forgive me if I am wrong and being a tad too cynical but nothing I know about Hillary Clinton and nothing I have heard her

say persuades me that she is seeking ‘the highest office in the land’ and tenure as ‘leader of the free world’ out of a burning sense of wanting to serve the public. There is not even about her - as ironically there is about Donald Trump - that she wants to see things done in a different way. Almost everything about her shouts entitlement and there’s more than just a sneaking suspicion that she feels the office of US president is somehow hers by right.

Trump, of course, is another matter entirely. There is the assumption that as a billionaire businessman he really can’t be all that stupid, that he must know a thing or two about this, that and t’other. And that line is largely one he has plugged throughout the four, five years the presidential campaign seems so far to have lasted. He likes to make out that he will bring to running the country as president a business-like attitude and will get things done. So Trump as a move and shaker? Up to a point, Lord Copper. First of all he inherited a great deal of wealth from his father and although he did put it to use and can claim some business achievements, it seems that his business success is largely down to him allowing things to tick over rather from any gift for innovation.

Most certainly the list of businesses he has started which went pear-shaped is not impressive, which doesn’t say much for his skill as a businessman. Four of his corporations filed for bankruptcy, and although Trump apologists point out that filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy is often merely a business ploy to carry on trading (or something), you do have to ask why those four businesses got themselves in such a state that they had to resort to such ploy.

Given that Clinton since the head of the FBI waded in last week with thinly veiled threats that he was ‘going to nail that bitch’, the chance that ‘the free world’ could really end up being ‘led’ by Trump after all becomes more likely. And given the United States’ baffling presidential electoral system, Trump might well be elected. But if, on the other hand, the top prize goes to Clinton, an already sour political reality in the US will get just that much sourer.

Arguably Trump only threw his hand in a year or two ago when various Republicans were jostling to become the Republican nominee began out of vanity. I really doubt he thought he might win the nomination, and perhaps even now, when he is taking a dump on the can and is all by himself with nothing but his thoughts and a handful of lavatory paper, he is still wondering ‘what the fuck is happening’. His candidacy, though, has proved useful in one respect: it has highlighted just how neglected by the political establishment a very, very large and disparate number of people feel in the US. The Breakfast referendum last June did pretty much the same thing in Britain, as did the surprising results of the EU parliamentary elections in just over two years ago.
. . .

There is pretty much everywhere what might be described as a ‘liberal elite’ or, alternatively, as a ‘metropolitan elite’ and I’m sure that, given that it will have been known be different names, there has been one for ages. For many folk both descriptions ‘liberal elite’ and ‘metropolitan elite’ are terms of abuse. But for some those descriptions are - quietly - worn as a badge of pride. And it was probably always thus. The self-regarding ‘elite’ might might not always have been ‘liberal’, but since Adam first rejected a Granny Smith and instead chose a Pink Lady, there will have been folk who think they are a cut above many others. Another word for them is ’snobs’.

Years ago when chatting to a colleague in the in-house bar of the Daily Express one Saturday night after our shifts had finished (we were working on the Sunday Express) she referred to ‘PLUs’. What are ‘PLUs?’ I asked. ‘People like us,’ she replied. Well, I didn’t much like her until then, and I liked her even less after that. I also remember coming across, in conversation with a young friend of my stepmother’s many years ago, the phrase ‘intelligent people like us’. I had previously regarded the young woman as rather silly, self-regarding and stupid, and her use of that phrase confirmed me in my judgment.

But make no mistake: there are a great number of people who do regard themselves, their views and their opinions as more than just a cut above those of the hoi polloi, but ‘more relevant’ and ‘more important’. And I’m sure none of them would be at all averse of being thought as members of the ‘liberal/metropolitan elite’.

Here in Britain we was a rather synthetic outcry when at the recent Conservative Party annual conference our prime minister Theresa May laid into the ‘liberal elite’, mainly from those already under suspicion of being members of that elite. This is how one Guardian writer reported on the speech. And here is the front page of the Daily Mail after May’s speech.

 But there can be no doubt at all that a large number of those on the Remain side do see themselves as being rather brighter than your average Joe, and it all came tumbling out when a majority of those who voted in the Brexit referendum went for Leave. Tony Blair — yes, he is still around and still hasn’t cottoned on that no one, but no one except dictators in the Caucasus want anything to do with him — has already called for a second referendum, presumably in the hope that the result will be different and a year ago was even crass enough to suggest that the public were simply too stupid to be relied upon to make a sensible choice on Brexit. That will most certainly have qualified him to become a leading member of the ‘liberal elite’. And without wanting to sound hysterical it is a rather shorter leap from Blair’s view to deciding that not everyone can be trusted to vote in an election and therefore shouldn’t.

While we here in Britain have been agonising about Breakfast, there has been astonishment in the US that Trump is still gaining support. But we shouldn’t be so surprised: there really does seem to be a groundswell of revolt against those — call them a ‘liberal’ or ‘metropolitan’ elite if you like — who think they know better than the ordinary Joe. And many of those pro Trump not necessarily pro Trump at all: essentially they are anti Clinton and what they perceive she stands for.

Me, I voted Remain — though I must repeat that it was through gritted teeth — and rather smugly reassured folk who asked me what the outcome referendum outcome should be that Remain would cruise home and then some. I even posted as much here in this blog. I mention that, though, because when I heard the news, I surprised myself by not only not really caring, but even detected in myself an element of ‘good, now this might well shake up the EU and bring it to its senses’.

The trouble with the whole issue is that ‘facts’ about the reason for Brexit support are hard to come by, and don’t bother consulting your newspaper: you’ll get as much, or rather as little, unbiased opinion from the saintly Guardian as from the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph (and it is worth recording that at least in the run-up to the vote the Mail was staunchly Leave whereas the more mealy-mouthed Telegraph hedged its bets right up to the line).

What is true because voting patterns were recorded is that support for Brexit was stronger in the North of England and in ‘working class’ and traditionally Labour parts than in ‘the Home Counties’ and London (where, one assumes, most of the ‘liberal/metropolitan elite’ live. And there was anecdotal evidence that what had largely upset many in those areas was not that ‘foreigners’ were ‘taking their jobs’, but that ‘foreigners’, that is EU citizens from former Soviet bloc countries where average wages are far lower than in Britain, were taking jobs at wages which were substantially higher than in their home countries but below average for Britain. The upshot was to depress wages overall, and Brits reported being told to take it or leave it — if they didn’t like the wage offered, there were plenty of EU migrants only to happy to take the job.

I have been working on this entry for the past two days and yesterday we heard that our High Court has ruled that Parliament must have a vote on Brexit, i.e. that the Government cannot constitutionally use the ‘Royal prerogative’ and simply declare UDI, sorry invoke Article 50. But as this entry is already over 2,240 words long, surely my two ha’porth on the matter must be kept for another time

. . .

This is apropos nothing. A few years ago, I spent two weeks on Mallorca and took loads of photos. I dicked around with one of them for a bit, then uploaded it for an entry here. But the entry was not written and the draft has been hanging around for no very good reason since then. I can’t even remember what it was supposed to be about. So I thought I might simply publish the picture, have done with it and forget all about it.

As the blog says, nothing much about very little. I was going to write about liberal/metropolitan elites, but somehow sidetracked myself. But I least by the by I have learned a new word

When I moved to London in 1990, at first commuting weekly from Cardiff where I had been living and working, then eventually shifting all my few possessions up to The Smoke, I was not - as the current cliche is - ‘in a good place’.

I had very vaguely - very vaguely indeed - been planning to set myself up as a freelance photographer, but getting the boot from my job as a sub-editor on the South Wales Echo for one cock-up too many (see this entry for part of the reason why) hastened things, and for about ten months I had scraped together a certain kind of living taking pictures, selling features to Wales on Sunday and working sub-editing shifts on the Western Mail (until its editor, one John Humphries - Geoff Rich without the heart, was one memorable description of the man, which, though, will mean nothing to anyone reading this unless you knew Geoff Rich - heard about my sacking from the Echo and banned his chief sub from giving me shifts. Incidentally, looking up John Humphries on the web to make sure I got the spelling of his name right, I notice he has reinvented himself as a gardener and writes a gardening column for Wales Online. Odd. All I can say is that I wouldn’t like to be a flower in his garden.)

Come the turn of the financial year in April 1990 and yet another of Britain’s financial crises, work dried up. It was as though the tap had been turned off. It was actually quite startling. No one wanted to spend any money. Until then I had been doing as well as I might have hoped and working hard. From April on there was virtually nothing, most certainly not enough to live on, so by June I did what I actually should have done ten years earlier and rang the Fleet Street papers to see whether I could get any shifts as a sub.

At the time ‘Fleet Street’ was still a notion in the industry and several papers were still located there or nearby. Now, none are, and ‘Fleet Street’ will mean as little to most as ‘Grub Street’. And you haven’t heard of Grub Street? Didn’t think so. If you are interested read New Grub Street by George Gissing to give you an idea. I struck lucky on my first call, to the Daily Express and was given several shifts. Other shifts followed on other papers and very soon indeed I was working seven days a week, here, there and everywhere. And that was a good thing, because I was once again suffering from one of the bouts of depression which have blighted my life and keeping busy was a tonic.

For whatever reason, I have never liked London, though to this day I can’t tell you why. But in 1990 and the few years after when I was feeling pretty low and the depression didn’t lift, I especially disliked it. Given the sheer size of the city and the spiritual state I was in, I felt very lost as though the city were sitting right on top of me, and I was keenly aware that in the grand scheme of things, I was utterly, utterly insignificant, rather like one grain of sand on a beach is indistinguishable from the billions of other grains.

Ironically, of course, that is pretty much all we are, insignificant, except that, thankfully and praise the Lord (Mammon, if need be and that’s your schtick), none of us is aware of it. Thankfully and for most of our lives we have family and friends

and, above all, company; we have a job or are otherwise usefully employed doing something or other, and so our lives have what is conventionally regarded as ‘meaning’. But ask the old and lonely how much ‘meaning’ they feel their lives have and you will not be heartened by the answers they give you. I must admit I didn’t really get to know London very well, because given the times I worked, from early afternoon until midnight and later, there wasn’t much time left over to get to know it. Even now I don’t see any of the city or its people and life.

Driving up on a Sunday morning, working a shift; working a double shift on the Monday and Tuesday, then a single shift on the Wednesday before jumping back into the car and driving westwards down here to North Cornwall doesn’t give you a great deal of time to hobnob with the Queen or get down and dirty in the nightspots of Hackney or wherever London’s cool go to chill. But even though I am hardly on even on a nodding acquaintance with the city and its people, I have to some extent become familiar with some of metropolitan attitudes.

I’ve always thought that to enjoy London you must be young, well-off and preferably both. OK, you can enjoy it even if you aren’t necessarily well-off and are obliged to count the pennies if long-term debt isn’t our bag, but being young is pretty much sine qua non. Come the early squalls of middle age and most folk hitch up and settle down and move to where rents and house prices are cheaper (although ironically doing so means they will spend more on commuting).

Some, of course, stay but then they can afford to. I was three days ago talking to a well-known Mail columnist with whom I’m on chatting terms and asked her where she lived. I knew it was in North London, but didn’t exactly know where. Hampstead, she told me. But then she is single - again - has no children and will be on a generous contract, so Hampstead is where she can afford to live. She’s in the minority.

. . .

I meant in this entry to write about what is called ‘the metropolitan elite’ or ‘the liberal elite’ and how I am devastated that to this day it has not occurred to anyone to ask me to join. I would most certainly turn down the invitation where it to be made, of course, but it would be nice to be asked. I intended to start off by writing about London, then gracefully segue into eight hundred words of pithy prose about that elite.

Sadly, I lost my train of though a little earlier on and, despite some frantic searching these past few minutes, I am not at present able to lay my hands on it again. So rather than write something which would forced, I shall leave that until another time. Sorry. Try again in a few days time (you not me. Your luck might be in).

. . .

I’ve just come across new word: idiolect. Just before posting this and returning to my browser, I was sidetracked (as invariably we are by the net) by piece about Bob Dylan getting the Nobel Prize in the Guardian. That’s where I came across it. The piece, which you can find here, is rather silly in that the Guardian features editor obviously thought the paper had to write something about Dylan and obviously felt that Armitage, a poet, might be the chap to do it. But I would rather he or she had gone for someone who truly liked Dylan from the start rather than Armitage, whose line is rather throwaway.

Here’s an excerpt: ‘Maybe in Dylan I recognised an attitude as well, not more than a sideways glance, really, or a turn of phrase, that gave me the confidence to begin and has given me the conviction to keep going.’ And maybe not. The piece seems to shout ‘I really don’t know a great deal about the man, but I could do with the money, so let’s go for it’. Shame.

Anyway idiolect: I have never before come across the word and as is a racing certainty I shall now hear it used several times over the coming few days. I wonder whether I have an idiolect? Be great if I did. Fancy!

Rush, rush, sodding rush - the bane of my life and I wish I could stop it!

If there is one thing I would change about myself, for the better, it would be to get rid of my tendency to rush almost everything. And I have had that tendency since I was a toddler. I remember my German mother telling me always ‘nicht so fix’, because there was a certain haste in everything I did. It led to toys broken within minutes of getting them, new clothes ripped within minutes of putting them on, and later professionally - I work as a sub-editor for whom attention to detail is possibly, probably even, the quintessential necessity - it has meant I really haven’t done as well as I might have done.

You might think that being aware of the tendency is the first step to overcoming it. Sadly, it isn’t. At work I consciously - very consciously - slow myself down or try to slow myself down and largely succeed to ensure that it doesn’t affect my work. Yet I have to admit that to this day ‘slapdash’ is my middle name and if I achieve a task without being slapdash, it is only after a great deal of effort.

Not rushing what I do is a constant battle, one waged from moment to moment, and if you have ever been jealous or worried, you will know how ‘being aware of something’ isn’t half the solution it is cracked up to be. For example, ‘don’t worry’ is pretty much the most pointless advice you can give to anyone who is worried. It’s good advice, yes, but pointless: have you ever tried not to worry about something which is a constant concern? And being told by well-meaning family and friends ‘don’t worry’ and verge on the supremely irritating.

If you have been jealous, whether of a lover or a friend or a colleague’s success, no amount of telling yourself that your jealousy is groundless does much to assuage that jealousy. I’m assuming that everyone reading this has felt such jealousy, although perhaps not everyone has. And, incidentally, I don’t think anyone will truly appreciate Shakespeare’s Othello unless they, too, have been jealous. That’s by the by.

This tendency to rush wheedles it’s way into more or less everything I do: I am constantly looking for shortcuts ‘to save time’, even though it doesn’t matter whether or not time is saved. I usually find myself impatient to get on with the task

in hand whatever it might be and to get on with the next even though there really is no rush and the next is no more important. I very often find it difficult to concentrate (although I have to add that every now and then I can concentrate beautifully, but it is then to the exclusion of everything else).

Where I get this tendency from I really don’t know. I had an older brother who seemed to be able to do anything with apparent ease - he excelled at school when he wanted to, he was a natural artist and musician and generally made me look like the plodder I finally have reconciled myself to be. Sadly, all that came at a price in that he suffered very bad mental health all his life - no one ever said so or made the

diagnosis, but it is likely he suffered from some form of schizophrenia - so perhaps that had something to do with it. But then perhaps not and saying so is mere speculation (and borders on that awful Sunday paper supplement cod psychology which is one staple of middle-brow conversation).

A few years ago, in the late 1980s when I was living in Cardiff and things weren’t going very well, I shelled out something like £60 and enrolled on a Transcendental Meditation course. I was very low, just been sacked from my job and had entered yet another bout of ‘depression’ (why I put that in quote marks I’ll explain later. NB Actually, I don’t in this entry, but if you go to my entry for October 16, 2015, which is what I would have repeated here) and was haunting local bookshops trying to find a self-help book which was quite obviously a load of old cack as, sadly, 99pc of them are. (I did come across a useful book about how to deal with ‘depression’ which was sane and down to earth, though I can’t know remember what it was called.)

The TM course was held over two or three days, and although I didn’t and don’t buy into any of its theory, I did learn a very useful meditation technique which I occasionally use to this day. But I should add that it is very simple indeed and I could demonstrate and pass it on in a matter of minutes, and it was most certainly

not worth shelling out £60 for. But then the whole TM movement was more than just about trying to pass on a meditation technique. (Is it still going? I must look it up in a minute. It does strike me now as something very much of the past, like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Moral Rearmament.)

One problem with talking about ‘meditation’ is that it sounds far deeper than it is and is invariably thought to be associated with some faith or other, or at the very least some kind of lifestyle. It seems to conjure up a certain way of living, ascetic rather than comfortable, a diet of porridge and acorns and communes in Mid-Wales where lavatory paper is regarded a bourgois luxury and the first step on the road to Hell. That’s here in Britain, of course.

I don’t want to sound in anyway goofy but there really is something to the notion of ‘inner stillness’ which we often hear about. I know, because I have, though rarely, experienced it, as perhaps have you. But once you have experienced it and know what it is, you are also know what a waste of time, effort, energy and emotion much of what we do daily is. Oh, and as far as I know there’s no need at all to pose cross-legged with your thumb and forefinger pinched together and facing up. That’s only obligatory in LA and Hampstead. The rest of us are allowed simply to sit somewhere comfortably and quiet.

As for the rushing, well, I’m doing it again: I’m rushing writing this so that I can post it, even though there is no earthly reason why this entry should be posted sooner rather than later or, to be quite honest, even at all.

The etymology of words is often illuminating, and the German for ‘to rush’ - hetzen is often also one way to describe racism - Rassen Hetze. The derivation would be from ‘hetzen’ used in a chase as in hunting. Oh well.

A few tunes to be getting on with as you all get on today with preparing to make your maker (it might seem a long way off, but believe me that bus is coming). And a photo or two, most by me.

Don’t Lose Your Mind



The main title music from Glengarry Glen Ross



Autumn Leaves




I Want To Ta-Ta You Baby



I Get A Kick Out Of You




I’m Not The Enemy

and a favourite cartoon I have come across

An entry for all of you who like a bit of twee crap about Mother Nature’s bounty

My sister’s husband works for a pharma company, and don’t worry, I regularly harangue him on the evils his employers perpetuate, their cynical pricing and how in an ideal world we would all be going to the grizzled old wise man who lives by the stream on the moor for some concoction or other when our ill health demands it. (The only respite he gets when I visit my sister is to retire to the loo, ostensibly, to take a dump, but even then I’ve found standing outside and yelling through the locked door can be quite effective. No man must be allowed to hide from the truth.) He has been posted abroad three times, which means my sister and her family have spend around five years each time in Manila, in the Philippines, Istanbul, Turkey, and are within weeks returning from a stint in Warsaw, Poland.

Holding down the job he does, my brother-in-law is very well-paid (and it has to be said the Germans do look after their own), but their lifestyle in Manila was truly colonial, paid for, of course, by her husbands bosses: a guard at the gate (no doubt armed), a man to take care of the pool, a driver, a great many maids (I think eight in total, one for each bathroom) and a superbly uniformed major domo who had merely one duty, to stand by the door when guests arrived looking very grand (and my sisters tells me he was very good at his job).

My sister insists the set-up wasn’t quite as outrageously swanky as it seems and, anyway, her domestic arrangements were quite modest compared to those of others. She also tells me (and I believe her) that employing so many folk (I won’t call them ‘natives’ or else I’ll have the Guardian on my back) is a real boost to the economy and at least 12 Filipino families are supported who might otherwise have nowt.

Life was similarly pleasant in Istanbul, where the family, or at least those of her four children still at home, lived in a rather splendid palace on a hill overlooking the city with impressive views of the Bosphorus. Warsaw sounds less attractive, however. But this entry is not about the why and wherefores, hows, whens, whatevers, which ways and whereforuntos of my sister and her husband’s gilded and unmistakably capitalist existence but - you guessed it, you are way, way ahead of me - seasons. My sister (who like me is half-English and mainly grew up in England until she married at 22 and moved to Germany) tells me that what she missed most while living high on the hog in Manila were the seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter.

There, she says, there were no seasons. The weather was the same throughout the year, hot and muggy, with the occasional muggy and hot interlude. There was no spring and twee poems from readers in the Daily Mail;s Peterborough column about the rebirth of Mother Nature, no summer with the endless chatter we are accustomed to here in Britain when a fine day makes it through to second and we all tell each other how splendid it is to live in Britain. There was no autumn and more twee poems in the Mail about rosy apples, hoary hawthorn and Mother Nature’s beauteous bounty. And there was no winter with poems about ragged Robin Redbreast pecking pitifully against the window begging for a scrap or two and when our transport infrastructure grinds to a complete halt and we all manfully struggle to work by foot through inches of snow. She missed all that (though she assures me, and on balance I believe her, that she was tempted to write a twee poem about ‘God’s glorious seasons’ only rarely and resisted the temptation each time).

Istanbul did have seasons, however, though a geographical oddity meant that in winter when her palace and its grounds on the hill were covered in a foot of snow, she could look down onto the bustling city itself where there was no snow whatsoever. Warsaw, it seems, also has it seasons like Britain, although the weather each brings, especially the winter and summer is pretty extreme: temperatures regularly hit -15c and in the summer hover at around 35c.

(She also tells me that about the only meat you can get in Poland is pork. The Polish eat pork several times a day, for breakfast, lunch and supper, and as soup, hors d’ouvre and for the main course. There are even some traditional desserts involving pork, she says, and not all of them are quite awful. On the other hand beef is rarer than a smile in Scottish kirk, though she did track some down a year or two ago, a restaurant in the red light district of Warsaw whose proprietor is regarded as decidedly odd by everyone else and, naturally, universally shunned. But this entry is about the seasons not meat.)

. . .

I mention this because we are officially now three days into autumn and it is quite noticeable. And here I should admit that autumn is my favourite season. I no longer care as I do in the summer when I sit outside with a glass of something and a Wilde Cigarros and shiver that the are is remarkably damp: after all, it’s autumn. You’re allowed to shiver - even supposed to - in the autumn. Down here in Cornwall, the autumn brings a marked reduction in the number of sodding tourists clogging up our very narrow lanes, although from now until the end of November we still get quite a few anglophile Dutch and the occasional German who arrive for a week or two because they ‘love Cornwall, we always have’ and want to ‘avoid the tourists’.

What are you, then? I always want to ask them. Seriously, if it wasn’t for the fact the Cornwall depends almost entirely on sodding tourists to provide work and keep widespread famine at bay for at least another year, there’s a good case to be made for erecting a barrier across the Tamar bridge at Launceston and turning back everyone who can prove beyond doubt that they are not a tourist and do have legitimate business in Kernow. Bloody tourists. I know for a fact that several magistrates here in North Cornwall treat with remarkable leniency anyone appearing before them charged with violence against a tourist.

Autumn also means the run-up to Christmas (although strictly a short part of that run-up is in winter, which officially begins on December 21), and the occasional bad weather is made a little more bearable because you have something to look forward to. And here in Cornwall October and November are usually very pleasant. OK, they aren’t warm and they bring a fair amount of stormy weather, but once you are holed up in a warm cottage with the woodburner on, it’s very pleasant to hear the wind howling outside and the rain beating against the windows. I have a theory that you prefer the time of year in which you were born, and my birthday is November 21, pretty much slap in the middle of autumn.

Anyhow, autumn is here and we should make the most of it before we have to soldier through the usually very dull and very trying months of January and February. Having said that, of course, it was even those nastier months which my sister missed when she still live in Manila. My cousin (I call him my cousin, but he is actually my stepmother’s nephew) lived in Taiwan for some time and once when he came back and we were sitting outside having a drink and it began to drizzle, he refused to come in but stayed outside to ‘enjoy’ the drizzle, because, he said, he had missed it so much while in Taiwan.

Here for those who like that kind of thing is an ‘autumnal’ photo, though a strongly suspect Mr Photoshop has had a strong input in this picture. Nothing’s that red.