Getting dark

Now the clocks have changed the afternoons are suddenly darker. At four o'clock I realised that I had not yet taken Milly for her walk and that I would need to get a move on if this was to be done before sunset. So we drove out to our favourite spot - the ridge overlooking the coastal plain. When it is not raining I love this time of year. During the summer the land becomes baked and deadened and the intense sunlight bleaches everything. Now the rains have turned the soil a dark chocolate brown from which burst bright green shoots. And the low sun backlights the clouds and accentuates the colours of the dying autumn leaves.

When we got to the ridge there was a southerly gale blowing, blasting low clouds over our heads and out towards the Adriatic. All around we could hear the crack of hunter's shotguns and the occasional dog barking. Milly stays close to me, her ears standing up, tense and alert. Down below I can see the lights of the little seaside town of Torre Canne at the centre of which stands a lighthouse, which has already begun to flash. I switch my MP3 player on and listen to the late John Martyn singing "Ghosts" on one of his last albums:

"Ghosts, they're everywhere ... I meet them in the guise of friends and they all know my name, I know them to look at and they know me just the same."

At this moment, out on the ridge in the gathering gloom, I feel both old and alright. My life is rich, layered and full of texture. The things around me are both themselves and also reflections of other things I have experienced, like echoes or ghosts of those other things, making the present more intense and numinous. I feel blessed and safe and at odds with so much of what I am told about the world. I do not believe that things are getting worse, because my life experience is of things being more or less the same as they ever were.

But I also know that I can only feel this sense of well-being because one day I will be dead and that so much of the pessimism I hear around me is only a reflection of the ineluctable fact that one hundred percent of us will die and that we all know this and it permeates everything we think and do whether we acknowledge it or not.

By the time Milly and I get back to the car it is almost night. I open the tailgate and whistle and Milly stops rubbing her coat in the patch of shit she has just found, pricks up her ears, trots towards me and obediently jumps into the boot. "Good girl!" I say and give her furry, slightly niffy, rump an affectionate pat.