if you concentrate you can almost smell her, Autumn that is, season of colours and cold noses and brilliant skies and shortening days. She’s just getting her bags packed and will be along any time now.

In the mean time a spot of advice, given to me by a friend, for those of us for whom playing and staying outdoors is a year round choice …

“….. truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if ….the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blankets between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.

Chapter 11, Nightgown, Moby Dick, by Herman Melville