Bandstand

Reflection

I didn’t get any fiction up this weekend due to being sick – but I’ll hopefully get something up during the week! In the meantime, here are a few more pictures I took by the canal last week.

Under Foot

I absolutely love this time of year. Sure, the days are quickly shortening, and we have maybe less sunshine and more rain than in the summer (though this year the summer was so awful there was no perceptible change except in the temperature). But there’s something about the clear light, the crisp mornings, the autumn colours, that set my heart pumping with joy.

I was laden down with a full backpack and my camera in my handbag when I stepped out into the street on Saturday afternoon. The sun had just come out and the street was lit up, pavements covered with fallen leaves. I just had to heave everything off my back and take some pictures.

I put my camera into a more accessible area in my bag and continued on my towards the canal – the way to my boyfriend’s flat. I took a few more photos on the way.

It’s funny, I seem to always become more active at this time of the year when everything is dying and declining. There are a lot of squirrels around my neighbourhood at the moment – one particular friend hangs around in my back garden every day, burying nuts in the flowerbeds for winter. Sometimes I feel like those squirrels – a scurry of creative activity spurred by the dropping temperatures and falling leaves.

So for the moment I am very happy – I am writing more and taking more photographs than ever before, and it feels as if the rest of my life is truly starting.

Fuchsia

I ended up staying at my parents’ longer than I thought, so I’ve yet to take the camera on an excursion, though it is now in my flat. However, I got a few pictures the other day in the garden that I was happy with. It was sadly the last day in a stretch of nice weather that we’ve had – it has since got a bit cold and cloudy. But I’m holding out for more sunshine – I don’t mind it getting a little colder, but the more sun, the happier and more creative I am.

It was quite windy on the day I took these, and Bumble was having a wonderful time sitting watching everything move about in the wind.

The fuchsia plants are some of the only flowers left blooming in the garden, but even they are falling now. It makes for some very pretty patterns on the ground, though.

I’m hoping to get some “exotic” pictures tomorrow – i.e. from my flat rather than my parents’ house. I’m definitely starting to get to grips with the new camera, but still a bit more practice to go before I’m completely comfortable with it!

September sun

Changing season

It’s the fourth day of autumn, and although there’s no sign of the leaves starting to turn – it’s usually a few more weeks, and thanks to all the rain this summer it’ll probably be later than usual – there is definitely that glowing August feeling in the air. I associate late autumn, in the run up to my birthday on Halloween, with cold sunshine and dead leaves blowing in gusts of wind – and already the wind is picking up and the sun in shining more often than it did all summer. I know a lot of people in Ireland consider August to be summer, and thanks to the school system it is still part of the ‘summer holiday’ season for me, but I can always feel the change of season coming on this month.

It’s been a tempestuous summer, and not only in terms of the weather. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much change happen during these months, and that’s saying a lot, as my summers were often very busy times for me. But my world has been shaken around quite a lot, and it looks like it might be about to turn upside down completely.

In a good way, though. I can’t say if it’ll all be for the best, because who can ever know that. But it feels good, it feels like it makes sense even though it doesn’t, not really.

The research project is starting to wind to a close. The first couple of months of that went very fast, but now it feels like I’ve been working on it too long. With all the changes that have been going on in my head and out of it, the coming towards the end doesn’t really feel like I would have expected it to. Or maybe these things never do – I guess the end of my BA didn’t feel as I might have expected either. But anyway, I can’t wait. I feel like my life is waiting to start. It’s not even that I have anything lined up or any solid plans, but with the new leaf I feel turning, it seems that with the end of the Masters I really will be ending one era of my life and starting a new one.

I can’t wait to have more time for writing and taking photos. Particularly writing – I have an idea that I’ve been gradually working on, and I’m itching to see if it can turn into something solid. Come September, all of this can actually start happening. A new beginning has rarely seemed so appealing.