Plain loveliness

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I'm not going to do it. I am not going to have an in-depth, race by race, psephologically acute, geopolitically relevant, why oh why, where do we go from here, and what does it mean for Sarah Palin post-mortem on the mid-terms. Enough is, occasionally, enough. I have asked far too much of you in the last few days.

Also, if I have to go through it all again my head may explode.

The great good fortune that saves me from disappearing entirely into the rabbit hole of political geekery is that I live with a bit of nature. There are the flowers and trees and stones and lichen and sheep and cows and distant mountains. There are the dogs, and the pig, of course. These are tremendous anchors of sanity.

Despite constant forecasts for rain, I woke this morning to defiant sunshine. The sky is the colour of sapphires. There is a high wind, to blow away my cares.

So today there will not be reams of prose, but a visual interlude instead.

I love this time of year because while there are the traditional autumn sights like this:

And this:

There are also, amazingly, the last haunting memories of summer, like the final flowering of the mint:

A quite surprising rosebud:

And a slightly tatty but still there fat Hidcote lavender:

Just as there is the stark elegance of the little apple tree, quite stripped of its leaves:

So there is the lush late flourish of the scarlet shrub rose:

And while everything is falling into shades of amber and ochre and red, there is also determined green:

And blue:

Meanwhile, in other pleasures, it turns out everyone shall have sticks:

Even I find it hard to get too exercised about politics when I have such a happy scene as this to rest my tired eyes upon:

I cannot guarantee that I shall not revert tomorrow. This is partly because I do have some unanswered questions. If this blog were the kind that offered prizes, I would put up a cash reward for anyone who can explain the most strange creature that is John Boehner to me. But for now, let us just contemplate the flowers:

And the pine cones:

And the trees:

I'll vote for those.