Apple

What a proper autumn we got this year! They call this a 'mast year'. All them trees has done so well, they got more beech nuts and berries and seeds and whatnot that they don't know what to do with 'em all, so they're shedding them on the ground. Everywhere you go there's hedgerows like treasure chests. We was out this afternoon and ooh, there's elderberries, hips and haws, all bright as jewels and the trees just turning amber. I reckon I could make a nice drop of elderberry wine and rosehip syrup this year, as well as me famous cordial. You have to leave plenty for the birds, mind, but this year there's more than enough to go round.

And there's something else you can do with them berries, too. Can't wait to decorate me hat.

Well, do I?

On a certain social networking site, things come round time and again.

On this social networking site you are never far away from a kitten. Fair enough,they are rather cute.

There are words of wisdom on this site. There are things to make you laugh. There are invitations to join some game or other just in case you're not already wasting hours of your one and only life.

They have pictures of dinners. Why do people photograph their food? Or, why do I just not understand that?

Then there are things like this - 'do you have the most wonderful, beautiful, talented and precious children in the world? Would you die/kill for your children? Would you fight off flame-throwing psychopathic ninjas for them? Are you proud of them? Do you love them all the way to the moon and back, or what's more, to the other side of Leeds? Will you hold them in your heart forever? Do they mean the world to you? SHARE if you have wonderful children who mean the world to you!'

What a stupid question. Of course my children are exceptional and amazing and I love them to bits. The lady I was having lunch with on Thursday said that I must be proud of them. I said I wasn't so much proud as greatly surprised and relieved that they've turned out so well in spite of being mothered by a madwoman. I show off about them at every chance I get. But 'proud' would suggest that it's about me, and it isn't, it's about them. And I don't SHARE. It would seem a bit cheesy, to be honest. (Maybe I'm just being very British and reserved about this.) It would undervalue the way I feel about them. And it might embarrass the daylights out of them. They know that I love them even if I don't click the thing that says 'share if your children are so precious that you would sell your granny in a wheelbarrow to save them'.

I occasionally share the kittens.

Fire!

What a great day! I travelled to York to met up with a dear friend from our North Yorkshire days. She is warm, wise and humorous, a saint with style and sparkle, and I owe her a lot. We met at The Bar Convent (look it up if you ever want somewhere to stay in York, or just to eat.) We talked of this and that, and I asked her about her experiences working in child care in the 1950s and 60s.

In those days, when she was training with Dr Barnardo's, they were trying to break free from the huge institutions of the past. Children lived in a 'children's village' with a small group of children living in each house in the care of housemothers. Not the babies, though - they were all together in a baby unit, with rows of cots and prams. A shift started at six or seven, and you could be on duty until ten if the laundry wasn't finished.

She told me of one place where she worked which had two dormitories full of boys. This was a large house with a lot of children in it, and in the days of open hearth fires the matron was very keen on fire drills, which often took place during the night. The boys loved it, because it was the only time they got to use the fire escape. It was out of bounds at all other times. As soon as the alarm rang they would jump out of bed, open the fire door, run down the fire escape and assemble in the yard.

Unusually one day,there way a fire drill in the afternoon when the boys were all out in the yard to play. At once they swarmed back into the house and up to the dormitories, opened the fire door, ran down the fire escape and assembled in the yard.

Let's

Let's make a difference.

Let's buy the fair trade coffee, chocolate or fruit, not just the cheapest.

Let's hold the door for someone.

Let's help the young mother get the buggy up the stairs in the shop.

Let's make someone laugh.

Let's plant winter pansies where somebody will see them.

Let's throw the washing up water on the garden, go round the house switching off lights we don't need, and put on a sweater to delay turning the fire on for another half hour.

Let's say 'well done' to somebody who needs it.

Let's send a card to somebody who could do with a hug by post.

Let's give thanks.

Let's think 'who needs me to love them this week?'

Let's recommend a good book to someone.

Let's do it today.

Harvest

What a lovely Harvest Festival we had today. It was an informal, family friendly service with a lot of children taking part, including helping the curate to make beans on toast. The point of this is that lots of different people brought things (somebody just happened to come to church with a toaster, somebody else with a tin of beans, etc) and more people helped, which was a lot of fun. The point is, of course, that we are not meant to isolate ourselves. We are meant to live in community. The rector got the job of opening the beans, and the sight of a left handed rector with a right handed tin opener was quite endearing.

I'm not sure if anyone ate the beans on toast. I was glad the curate didn't because he was wearing his cassock alb, as white as an angel's tablecloth. And we didn't sing the trad Harvest hymns, which didn't bother me, but there are sure to be complaints.

Not long ago, Harvest Festival produce was largely fruit and veg and was taken to the old and infirm. This meant giving apples to old ladies without teeth and cabbage to old men with creaky digestions. By the time the fruit met the frail and infirm it had fallen off the altar steps twice and been juggled with by a choirboy. If you weren't frail and infirm to begin with...

This morning people brought fruit and veg, but mostly I think it was pasta, soup, biscuits, tea, things like that, piled up at the front of the church. They were to go to a food bank. The churches in the UK are doing a great job with food banks, providing food to people who are hard up and also offering friendship, support, a listening ear, guidance to the agencies who can help them. Great things are being done through food banks. But in the 21st century, in the UK, it's a scandal that they have to exist.

I was talking recently to a friend who lives in Sheffield. (That's a big city that thinks it's in the north, but it's as far south as you can go without nudging the Midlands.) I asked her if there was a food bank in Sheffield.

'There are seventeen' she said.

Tarka and Teasel

'Tarka and Teasel' sounds as if I've just bought two kittens. I haven't.

Tarka the Otter is one of those wildlife classic stories. It's the life story of an otter, and I think it was written in the 1930s. It's set in Devon, mostly on the river where Tarka fishes, mates, escapes from otter hounds (otter hunting was legal at the time) and survives the long harsh winters. No costumes, no talking. This isn't Mistmantle. This is the story of a real otter on a real Devon river. It's told in the third person, but all from Tarka's point of view. I read it when I was eleven and it wasn't always an easy read - it made me cry more than once - but a satisfying one that carries you down to the river and into the otter's world. In the winter I could feel Tarka's hunger and was desperate for him to find food. The author, Henry Williamson, developed some unpleasant political beliefs which may have led to his books going out of fashion. Pity, because his books are a lot better than his politics.

In his corner of Devon, around Bideford and Barnstaple, you can't ignore Tarka. There is a walking trail called the Tarka trail, and the local railway line is the Tarka line. By the way, it's also a very beautiful area.

When I write animal books they are mostly from the hero or heroine's point of view, but I try to put a window into the animal's mind, too. When I wrote A HOME FOR TEASEL I had to move into the mind of a pony. I had to see the world the way she would see it, the way she hates being put into confined spaces and her need for a place in a herd. It's as much Teasel's story as Gwen's, so we have to see with her mind.

The book I'm working on now has a little dog in it. He's a very confused little dog at times. The more I write him, the more I feel that human behaviour must be so bewildering to dogs that they can't make head nor tail of us, and come to that, we don't even have tails, and who can get through life without a tail to wag? I think it's very good of dogs to put up with us at all.

Black Cat

Across the road from the New House of Stories (or the House of Books and Bears, as I think it may become) lives a big black cat with green eyes. It is a very picture book cat of a cat. I don't know its name.

When we first moved in we saw it a lot, but then, when we first moved in Daughter was with us and I could swear that cats talk to her. They have an understanding, Daughter and cats. (Her grandfather is also a cat person. Her Aunt Helen is great with cats and has two, but Helen is happy with anything four-legged.) The day the removal men were hauling wardrobes out of the van, the black cat was arching its back under Daughter's hand and following her around.

Since she went home, nearly two months ago, we've hardly seen it. Then yesterday afternoon, when I was sitting working in the front room, Cat jumped on to the wall and from there to the top of the wheelie bin, where it curled up on sentry duty. (You can't fall asleep on a wheelie bin, they don't look comfortable. You'd slide off. This was a thinking cat.) It was there on the wall again today when I went out, and still there when I came back.

I say hello to it and tell it what a good cat it is, but it's a dignified cat, so I don't stroke it. I get the feeling it might turn around and walk away or scratch me if I did. Perhaps it doesn't feel that I know it well enough yet.

"You have not earned the right to touch me," thinks the cat. "Send me the Princess. She alone is worthy."