Autumn Equinox

The autumn equinox is tomorrow, the 22nd September. It is one of two days in the year when the lengths of day and night are equal, irrespective of where you are on Earth. I suppose that the length of day is measured as the time the sun spends above a featureless horizon, like at sea.

It can be seen as the start of autumn though, at our latitude, the outriders of autumn are well advanced. While the leaves on many trees are still green, the sycamores are already shedding theirs in the forestry around Dunrobin.

Autumn has its attractions, amongst other things because the fungi give us something to search for on our walks, but the walking itself will come more hazardous as the frosts and snow come on: I have recently bought spikes to screw into the bottom of a pair of walking boots to wear when the going becomes slippery.

One of the few attractions of winter are the auroras. During the summer months, when the sky is light all night, they become invisible, but this event was perfectly timed as a reminder of what may come, the first red alert for many months. Needless to say I missed the maximum, realising that something was happening shortly after ten. The northern sky still glowed a milky green but the dancing lights were masked behind cloud.

It is the winter cold which I dread, the cold and the long, dark nights. We are fortunate that we can fold ourselves into the centrally heated warmth of our houses while most of God's creatures are shivering outside, but even so the chill still seems to seep into our rooms; and up here, at latitude 58N, the daylight hours are desperately short and the winter long.

We were never designed for this. Homo sapiens should have left the high northern latitudes to the woolly mammoth and sabre-toothed tiger and stuck to where we belonged....

....the all year round warm savanna-lands of Africa.