Salad

There is an indefinable something in the air that suggests we have seen the last of summer for this year. Unfortunately it was a brief appearance at best, leaving us feeling a little short changed. Maybe it's the way the evenings are arriving ominously early all of a sudden, or the autumnal gusts chasing leaves along the pavements, or the fact it says September on my calendar. (Mind you, it is pretty impressive that I have changed it over from August so early in the month.)

The onward march of the year is marked in so many ways. The bronzed sheen I obtained from two sunny days in southwest Wales has all but faded. And I am less inclined to reach for a summery short-sleeved shirt when getting dressed in the morning. Indeed, it is too dark to see what I'm reaching for when I get dressed in the morning, though usually I can detect long-sleeved shirts by the sense of touch alone, and generally manage to put them on without turning them inside-out. Socks are a different matter. They do occasionally go on the wrong way round. And my colour vision is not very reliable in the dark. But I find it all serves to entertain my work colleagues, which cannot be a bad thing. I still have – returning to the end of summer theme and putting aside, metaphorically, the socks – salad things in my fridge, though I am starting to wonder about them. Wonder whether I am quite in the mood for salad, this close to Christmas, not wonder whether they are actually still salad things. Once a spring onion, always a spring onion I say.

And my daughter returns to school tomorrow. Which is probably a lot of fun for her and something she is really looking forward to. Though seeing that the school usually frowns upon pupils spending all day in their pyjamas, there is a chance I could be mistaken.