When all is complicated
‘Thank you for your purchase… We are pleased to receive your order… Your order is with despatch team… Shipment scheduled to be sent… Your package is on its way… Shipment with our delivery service… Your order is on its way… Delivery tomorrow…Delivery today… Out for delivery now… Delivered’
You may be familiar with the emails you can get if you order
online. For my last order I had twelve separate messages. Then at the end ‘How
did we do?’ I did not take the survey. Somehow it is all too much. What
happened to ‘Thank you for your order' and then a delivery? How we have
complicated the world until it is almost not understandable.
The garden and the seasons are more predictable. Now we are
in October we are well and truly into autumn. Our luscious fruit and vegetables
have suddenly stopped. The few remaining tomatoes hang limp and green, the
peppers, aubergines and courgettes have withered overnight. We had our final
sweetcorn meal for lunch yesterday with butter (low fat margarine) running down
our chins.
But all is not lost. The pumpkin is a gleaming golden orange
and the spaghetti marrows are ripening to a pale yellow matching the autumn
sun. We have begun picking and storing the apples for the winter. Not all
varieties are ready at once and we keep a keen eye on our calendar and on those
that begin to drop. I gently lift one in my cupped hand and if the stalk snaps
and the tree lets it go, if the tree gives it to me, then the fruit is ready to
pick.
Our little country road is also being prepared for the
winter. It has been closed. We have had potholes here for the last few years.
They were all shapes and sizes and some were repaired. But the deep ones were
left. It was almost impossible for me to cycle down the road because I could
not risk the jolt of dropping into a hole. Traffic got confused if I suddenly
swerved to the other side. Then one day someone came and painted a line round
each pothole and now, at last, the deep holes are being scraped and filled. It
has taken so long that I would think that the original repairs to the shallow holes
need mending again!
One last thing I always did in autumn was take the post cards down from my kitchen cabinet where they were displayed. But not many people have managed to get away this year and no one sends a card now, we are back to the email message which is not quite the same.
(Taken from my column in the Shropshire Star)
Our spaghetti marrows drying in the autumn sun
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