The Fiesta's windscreen was white at 6.45 on Monday morning. Not thick, just enough to draw a face in with a finger. It was 5 October, which felt early, and I stood on the pavement in my dressing gown and wellies (I'm not proud of the combination), scraping with the scraper that had spent the summer in the glovebox. First frost of our second autumn on the street.
The hill in the wet
The leaves came down in the last week of September, and then it rained, which on a hill is how you get a pavement with a coat of brown paste on it. The steepest stretch of our street runs past the next block at roughly one in five. On Thursday I stepped off the bus at the bottom and performed a slow, graceful, entirely involuntary skate for about two metres. A man walking a spaniel said "Aye, they're bad today," as if the leaves had personally let him down.
Dad, who delivers parcels for a living, says wet leaves are worse than ice because you trust them. On Tuesday morning a hatchback tried to get up the hill at 7.15, spun its front wheels on the bend and reversed all the way back to the junction with its hazards on. Maureen sweeps her bit of pavement at 8.00 every day, and I have never seen a leaf last in front of her house past quarter past. Ours blow to the corner and sit there as if they've been told to wait.
After last year's gutter business I now watch the back corner in heavy rain. On Saturday Matt cleared the back gutter from Jas's ladder, with me footing it: two buckets of sycamore leaves, mostly from the tree two doors down. On Tuesday night I stood at the back bedroom window at ten with a torch and watched the water go where it should. It did. I felt absurdly proud of a gutter.
Parking after dark
Before about 6.15 you can find a space on our street. After 6.30 you can't. Last Wednesday I got back from the big shop at ten past seven and circled for twelve minutes before giving up. I've learned to park on the flat stretch at the bottom of the hill, three streets away, and walk up with the bags and a head torch. The walk took four minutes and thirty-eight seconds, because I timed it. The Fiesta goes in gear, front wheels turned into the kerb, handbrake on, the way Dad drilled it into me at seventeen.
A streetlight at the gennel end went out in September. I reported it on the council's website on 22 September and it came back on 1 October. Nine days is a decent result for a street the council could easily have forgotten, and I said so in the feedback box, which I have never done before.
Small autumn things
The library book sale was on Saturday 3 October, ten till one, in the room where the radiators clank like a ghost in a pipe organ. We spent £2.30 between us: a 1960s woodwork manual for Matt (£1), a crime paperback with a coffee ring on page one (50p) and a cookery book with a gravy stain on the roast chapter (80p). The stain is the best review of a recipe I've ever seen.
Ruby from across the road is three, and she knocked on Sunday afternoon with a carrier bag of conkers from the park. She put them in a row on our step and told Pickle they were hers. Pickle was unmoved. That morning we'd gone up to the Bole Hills at eight, onto the grass where we watched the fireworks last November, and the city had gone. A white lid of fog sat on the valley with the top of one tower poking out of it. We stood and looked at nothing for ten minutes with a flask, and it was one of the better views we've had.
The heating is still off. By six the lights are on in the row opposite and the street smells of somebody's tea and wet leaves. That is how I know it's October, more than the calendar does.
