September Song

As I write this, we are two hours into September; and even writing that word it feels like autumn. Yesterday was a perfect summer day, big blue skies, unbroken sunshine and wonderfully hot. And yet, today is September; in the garden the remains of our vegetables ripen; pumpkins, tomatoes and courgettes, the leaves on horse chestnuts are already turning golden; it is now dark before nine, before half eight in fact, and next week children will go back to school.

We have been in our house since February, and have enjoyed every minute of it. Our garden is coming along, and Jools has plans for next years harvest and how to fit it all in in our little green patch of English countryside.

As the nights lengthen, the mornings get colder and the dew heavier.

Sitting in the garden, watching the day turn to night was one of the things we dreamed of in this house, and it is one of the things we have enjoyed most. That and the quiet.

The flat was on a main road, by a set of traffic lights, and the noise from the road went on all night, that and the sound of drunks meant we could not have the window open in our bedroom, and so it was so unbearably hot and humid. Not here, high on the cliffs; we do hear the odd boy racer tearing down Station Road at all hours, but not much. Instead we traded in traffic noise for owls and wind whistling through the treetops, just as it should be.

We live now about four miles north of Dover, in a village called St Margaret's-at-Cliffe, on a quiet side road overlooking farmland and across to a rise in the rolling fields to the Dover Patrol monument which marks the cliff edge and the beginning of the English Channel, some two miles away. Or less, we haven't measured it. We can't see the monument right now, as a tree full of leaves blocked that in April, but we know it's still there.

We have good neighbours, although we speak we have to have them round for drinks and an official 'hello', but we speak when we see each other, and we swap garden produce, just because it's the way it should be.

When the wind is in the right direction, we can hear the tannoy announcements from the harbour, and the lights tinge the bottoms of low clouds orange way over Dover way. But here, there are one or two lights, the occasional barking dog, and early on summer mornings, the lone cockerel from the farm telling us we should really be getting up.

Down the dip and up the other side is the main part of the village, where all the tourists go; all narrow street and lovely pubs; but not here, it's just quiet. To live in the village would have cost another, maybe £50k, and further on, a clifftop house would have cost us another £100 to £300k more. But we're happy here. We can walk to the cliffs and not pay the extra mortgage.

Our three cats have settled down, the are calm and happy; Sulu is plodding along in his old way, always asking if it's dinner time yet and would we mind sitting down so he could sleep on our lap. Little Girl is still as scardy as ever; well, maybe not quite. She sleeps on the spare bed and delights in being cuddled, and the lightning maybe doesn't worry here quite as much. And Molly loves it; she is the Queen of all she surveys, and then some. She sleeps on our bed when she wants, eats the other's food, and lets us stroke her , sometimes. And is slowly clearing the locale of small rodents; only two nights ago one small kidney was all that remained of another small mammal.

And we humans are blissfully happy; we come home from work to our little piece of heaven and unwind. It's just what we wanted when we first saw the house last year, and where we want to grow old in.