I have discovered, courtesy of Facebook, that today is something called the Autumn Equinox.
This sounds nicely pagan and worthy of festivities, but I must own up that in fact I do not have the first idea what an Equinox is.
A better informed friend remarked on Facebook that one is supposed to bake bread. It is useful to know this, but it only tells me what I should do, not what a day actually is.
Anyway, I didn’t bake bread. I made some biscuits yesterday and that is my baking quota for at least the next fortnight, although now I think about it, I do quite like home-made bread, although eating it rather than kneading it is my favourite bit. In fact I didn’t have any time to do any cooking whatsoever today, and when it came to getting something ready to eat at work tonight I was so desperate that I fried some leftover pizza, which made Mark laugh a lot when he found it in his bag, and he made some ironic remarks about healthy living, although he ate it anyway. So did I, and actually it was nice, I can recommend it.
In any case, I might not know what an Equinox is, but I know perfectly well what a fast-approaching autumn leading up to a cold winter is, and it is thundering towards us like an approaching Eddie Stobart wagon. We have got all sorts of little projects going on at the moment, one of which is the collection of firewood to keep us warm when the sun has gone away.
The air has the feeling of autumn about it all the time now, even the sunshine has that golden, nearing retirement, Saga-age feeling about it, and there wasn’t any today in any case. Today it rained, drizzly, persistent, still, damp rain, and I got soaked.
I went up to the farm with Mark today, the idea was that he did some of the work that his car needs for its MOT and I would cut firewood. There is a pile of old fence posts at the farm which Mark’s sister has said we can have for the fire if we will cut them up and get them out of her way, and so this was my job for the day.
It would have been a lot easier if we hadn’t abused and neglected our chainsaw so badly over the past ten years that it has got almost no teeth left and doesn’t cut straight. It needs various bits replacing, not least a new chain. Also it has some operational issues that alarm even my slapdash inner Health and Safety officer, in that it doesn’t stop running and the chain just keeps on going round.
Mark said it would be fine, and gave me a hard hat with some earplugs, so that I wouldn’t be able to sue him if I accidentally cut my head off, but it was so irritating that after a while I took it off and went back to my normal Health and Safety practice of being so scared of the chainsaw that I am really really careful. This worked just as well as it usually does, and I am pleased to announce that I still have all my limbs.
We also have a smallish pile of firewood. It would have been a big pile of firewood but even though Mark sharpened the chainsaw it was like trying to saw through toughened steel.
It was a nice way to spend a day. It was quiet at the farm, apart from the horrendous racket I was making, obviously, but when I stopped everywhere was still, apart from the eternally pattering rain. Everywhere smelled of earth and damp grass and sawdust, I could listen to the sheep bleating in the next field, and wondered what on earth they had got to say to one another, since it seems a bit of a waste of evolution to have such a loud voice and nothing in particular to announce.
In the end Mark took pity on me and borrowed his sister’s chainsaw, which has been properly maintained, because only plumbers have permanently dripping taps. I used that then, and the difference was astonishing: it could cut through a fence post like a French guillotine through the neck of the first Comte of the day. It took hardly any time at all before I had got a decent stack of logs in the back of my taxi, and could haul them off home.
It was a good boost to the log pile. We looked at the fire and thought that we ought to light it, but we were going off for a swim and to work then, so there didn’t seem much point. It is nice to have it stacked around with logs again, a hopeful feeling for the winter to come.
It has been a nice Equinox, whatever it was, even without baking bread.
