" Not the yellow Provençal August...

... of the English imagination." ( Iris Murdoch, again, from 'The Sea, the Sea'.)

I never much cared for August. A rank, flyblown time of year, the stale fag-end of summer grudgingly conceded to us by British school holidays, while over the Channel and the Atlantic, we knew, they played and basked all through July as well. The roads crowded, the service tired and jaded, ice cream sticky in the sand. High summer, in the sense that things are high when they start to smell. Sticky and dusty, by turns hot and dry and thunderous and torrential, and sometimes miserably, disappointingly cold, the sea shiverous. Never comfortable.

Yellow like ragwort, that sneaky plant that lures unfortunate animals with its persistent juiciness when other greenstuff dries out, then mercilessly poisons their livers.

I believe there is a kind of fractal pattern in the year and the day. Just as there is an Hour of the Wolf, that time of wakefulness in the stretches after midnight and before dawn when all one's fears and demons seem to have been lying in wait ready to prey and torment and pursue and do their worst, and one longs for light and morning for relief, so, a half-turn around the twenty-four hours, there is a corresponding Dog Hour, that mid-afternoon low point, not dark and menacing like the Wolfish time, but sluggish, apathetic, dull of sense, filled with a mood of pointlessness, and, for me, though it can be shaken and evaded by action and detachment, only really turned at that time of the evening when the working day is officially put away, the dog is fed, the wine is poured, the kitchen comes to life and all is wrapped in animated cosiness.

Similarly, there is that lean and Lenten time early in the year, in February or March, when the days lengthen but the cold and harshness seem to bite just that bit harder, when, even in these well-fed, centrally heated ( for some of you!) times, one feels the fear that one's reserves, the spiritual woodpile, may just not last, that the Wolf, who is hungry too, may really, at some deep ancestral level, be at the door. And, of course, the 180 degree point around the circle from then is now, the Dog Days, la canicule, caniculares dies. The time when summer is tired and grouchy, the nights perceptibly draw in, things lose their sharpness and savour, and I think of fires and the scent of chrysanthemums.

August used to make me long for autumn.

Now, though, I'm coming round to August, its baked-goldenness, and brightly peppered weedy wayside flowers. It helped when I discovered it was autumn. That is to say, Celtic autumn, the harvest and gathering season. Not Fall, not the colourful, smokey, nut-filled, first-frosts time, but Lughnasadh, Lammastide.

The Celtic seasons have an offset rhythm with regard to the traditional ones, and can seem rather unsettlingly previous in their expectations. Early February, Imbolc, Candlemas, (Groundhog Day even...), is surely too early to call spring, yet there is that sense of shift, of turning, of hesitant awakening. And it never seemed quite right that Midsummer Day, solstice, the longest day, was also the first day of summer, when from then on the days would shorten. But if one thinks of summer not as the full, hot, lazy time, but the time of growing light and full blooming, it makes far more sense to begin it at Beltane, May Day.

The descent into winter and darkness takes place from Samhain, Halloween, when the veil between the worlds is thin.

This year too, I appreciate especially the last heats of August however patchy and moody, which, after the non-summer in this part of the world, are less of a last gasp and more of a gracious bonus. And I always enjoy September, now it no longer means returning to school, at least personally - my current teaching resumes in October. It is Tom's birthday month, and we usually get away somewhere; most things are still open but the holiday places are usually more relaxed, more empty, heaving a sigh of collective relief, and the weather is often delightful, but with just a tang of sharpness, one's perceptions stirring with the earth's changes.

We have had the camera for about a year now, I realise, as the first pictures I took were of fields of wheat and barley, round bales of straw and gatekeeper butterflies on knapweed. It seemed frustratingly difficult at first, but some of them weren't too bad. I felt a little sad thinking that now I had covered all the seasons, as I had looked forward to new things to photograph with the changing year. But of course there will always be new things... and always the same ones.