November leaves

click photo to enlarge

The leaves are fast disappearing from the trees leaving them stripped, their "bones" becoming black tracery against the sky. As I walked through the village this afternoon I made a note of those trees that were clinging on to their leaves, reluctant to let them go. One or two silver birches had a few yellow leaves dancing on the northerly wind. The beech trees had more than most, a harmony of brown, orange and yellow, still looking quite full, like a skirt around the lower limbs and trunk. The sycamore leaves have mostly gone, as have those on the hawthorns, but in one or two places they too clung on to a cluster ot two. All the horse chestnuts were bare with wet black trunks and branches. The willows, as ever looked the fullest, perhaps half, maybe more of their leaves gone, but plenty still remaining, making them look like the hirsute in a crowd of ballards!

Evidence of the leaf fall was everywhere in the piles of wet, rotting leaves against the kerbs, up the side of buildings and garages, and in drifts on the hedge-row bottoms. The dank sodden piles offered no delight to children, either to hurl in the air or to kick through like a silvan plough. As I stepped over and through them, being careful not to slip, I remembered the crisp, dry banks of fallen plane tree leaves I'd crunched through in London only a fortnight or so ago. Today's photograph is one that I took then, when the earliest fallen brown leaves were still being joined by their green and yellow compatriots.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 50mm
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/50
ISO: 160
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

A November landscape

click photo to enlarge
A Victorian writer who knew him, says of the English poet and humourist, Thomas Hood (1799-1845), that "his existence was a long disease rather than a life", plagued as he was by ill health from childhood. However, by the time of his early death at the age of 46 Hood had endeared himself to the British public through his satirical observations on contemporary life published in "Punch" and "Comic Annual". His novels, such as the romance, "Lamia", were bought in respectable numbers, as were his volumes of poetry. Some individual poems such as his "Song of the Shirt", a piece of social commentary about the working conditions of shirt-makers, were highly acclaimed, being translated for European audiences as well as finding wide readership in Britain.

Today Hood is recognised by many but revered by few, his work slipping back into the second tier of Victorian writers. Nonetheless, as I cycled through the Lincolnshire Fens late in the afternoon of an overcast day it was his poem about the month of November that came to mind. I heard it as a schoolboy and enjoyed its simple structure. Back in those days we hadn't heard of SAD (seasonal affective disorder), but as I re-read the poem for the first time in decades I did wonder if it was one of the afflictions that poor Thomas Hood bore along with his other illnesses! But no, it was probably just his reaction to drab, damp, smog-wreathed London in the year's penultimate month.

No!

No sun—no moon!
No morn—no noon!

No dawn—no dusk—no proper time of day—
No sky—no earthly view—
No distance looking blue—
No road—no street—no “t'other side this way”—
No end to any Row—
No indications where the Crescents go—
No top to any steeple—
No recognitions of familiar people—
No courtesies for showing 'em—
No knowing 'em!
No travelling at all—no locomotion—
No inkling of the way—no notion—
“No go” by land or ocean—
No mail—no post—
No news from any foreign coast—
No Park, no Ring, no afternoon gentility—
No company—no nobility—
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member—
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds—
November!

I was propelling my bicycle homewards, through the winding lanes of the flat landscape, when the sun made a brief appearance over the the village of Gosberton, and I stopped to compose this landscape using the spire of St Peter & St Paul to balance the illuminated clouds.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 48mm (96mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/320
ISO: 200
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On