The Village In November

The village is closing down for the winter. The overripe fruit has fallen from the untended orchards, and already rotted into the ground. The fields are harvested, ploughed, and some re-sown with spring crops. The big sweet chestnut hanging over the road to Broadby has delivered its festive treats for those who can be bothered to collect them.
      Eddies of bronze and gold leaves whirl around pavement edges, and gather in sheltered corners. Some plants are starting to bud in the current climate catastrophe confusion. They will find out soon enough that they are premature with their ambition.
      The garden is ready for winter: the red robins are trimmed back, and the lawn has received its Autumn feed, a quick spiking from Alex, and maybe its last mow; plants that won’t survive the winter are covered, or brought inside; the raised herb bed cut right back, which means we have to spend a fortune on buying them in little plastic packets until the spring.
      November is a sad, depressing month. The temperature is a steady eight, eight, nine, eight, like a reasonably good dancer on Strictly, which is something else imposed upon us unrequested at this time of year. It takes me back to my junior school days, when for the whole of the Autumn term I was sent out every morning to record the temperature in new fangled centigrade. Eight, eight, nine, eight. When you’re young time moves more slowly, and my introduction to analytical science was interminable.
      The “fen blow” becomes more intense as winter approaches, whipping without hindrance across the bleak landscape. Water levels begin to rise on the Great Ouse – whenever there is a good downpour inland in Oxfordshire or Bedfordshire we feel the consequences two to three days later. It’s rarely too serious, as the area is designed to flood, with the Ouse washes taking the bulk of the extra water with ease.
      At the same time as the sadness of another year passing sinks in, there is renewed hope and optimism. My Sunday morning ritual of winding the clocks and feeding my two sourdough starters now includes feeding the Christmas cakes (with whisky, sherry or rum depending on which bottle is to hand), and shaking the sloe gin bottles.
      Sloe gin is made in late October, when the fruit are as ripe as possible without having yet fallen off the blackthorn bushes. It’s a straightforward process, you would think: two thirds of a bottle of gin, six ounces of sugar, fill the bottle up with pricked sloes.
      One year, when I was still an apprentice in the art, my sloe gin tasted terrible. I phoned my mother.
      “What exactly did you do?” she asked.
      I recited the recipes, finishing my description with “And then I pricked the sloes and dropped them into the bottle.”
      “What did you prick the sloes with?”
      “A metal skewer.”
      “No!” said Mum firmly, “You need to prick them with a wooden cocktail stick.”
      Ahhhhhhhhh! This was where I’d been going wrong. Schoolboy error!
      Despite me having a degree in chemistry, don’t ask me why this makes a difference, but it does. That was over twenty years ago, but never again did I use a metal skewer to prick my sloes, and never again have I had a problem with the flavour. I’ll bottle this year’s next week.
      On our morning walk today I took a saw, which I tried to conceal alongside my leg as I walked. Alex said I looked like a cross between Basil Fawlty and a German SS officer suffering from a shrapnel wound. It was in aid of obtaining The Branch. Last year we found a perfect branch in the disused orchard we circumnavigate every morning. We didn’t know it was perfect until we hauled it home and carried up the stairs, then dangled it from the bannister into the stairwell: it fitted perfectly, splaying its twigs in a perfect arc ready to become the centrepiece of our Christmas decorations. For weeks Alex has been worrying that this year’s branch won’t be as good as last year’s, and every morning walk for the last few weeks we have eyed up potential replacements (why didn’t we just keep last year’s, I keep asking myself). Today was the day, and having identified our victim, the deed was done. I then walked home with The Branch concealed in my underpants. Not really, but you would have thought so from the looks I got from the dog walkers as I sauntered home with it slung over my shoulder.
      There is much else to look forward to, and plan for: Christmas games to prepare, our Christmas social across in the village hall, customers to fit in at the last minute (regulars booked us in early January), presents and cards as well of course. But there is always as well a feeling of nostalgia, about Christmases past, of the excitement of Christmas Day, memories of family get-togethers, Boxing Day parties, friends you hadn’t seen all year, home-cooked food that you weren’t allowed any other time of year, the Christmas tree. I look forward with great anticipation to Christmas with Alex’s wonderful family, but it’s so sad that I can’t be with my family any more. Maybe one day.
      You can’t recreate the past, as Gatsby found to his cost, but you can create a future that takes the best elements of the past, and forges them into something bigger and better and more meaningful. That’s progress, that’s life. But there’s still a place for a little nostalgia.
      As the man said: Oú sont les neiges d’antan?

Notes

Oú sont les neiges d’antan?
Where are the snows of yesteryear? Francois Villon (1431 – 1463) – Ballade Des Dames de Temps Jadis]