Magical Autumn

There was a time in my life when summer was my favourite stretch of the year. This, of course, was when summer meant a definitive season, when it meant the seaside where big palms would swing in the wind and salt and sand and the hot sun where all that there was to it until September. But autumn is so much better and now that I am free to walk about parks when I should be in the office (insert big grin here), it feels special, magical, even wicked, yes. Today I went out with a friend of mine and as we were ranting about work and the future, we came across beautiful things such as this:



These:



This:



And these:



As we were walking, I experienced a flashback to a year ago, when I used to spend my lunchtime hour (more like my lunchtime half-hour actually) on a bench by a pond infested with Canadian geese, staring into the distance, dreading the two o'clock meeting with the stakeholders (a word I could never ever stand; I always expected these people to turn up holding stakes as opposed to Costa coffee cups, which is really what they used to hold during these meetings). At this time I would take my work notebook with me, a very inappropriate pink flowery pad which rose many eyebrows on many occasions and I still wonder why, and I would write. I would write and re-write the beginning of Cinnamon Sticks for Breakfast - A Summery Tale of Christmas Madness, a children's book whose idea I had been toying with since Christmas 2004.

Unbelievable, yes? Me writing a children's book? Me, who can lace up each and every conversation with a torrent of uncalled for profanities, me who is more f-worded than Gordon Ramsey, me who very nearly cannot stand children, me writing a children's book... Well yes. There is plenty of unfinished business to tackle before I continue Cinnamon Sticks yet it's funny how a walk in the park can solicit a whole afternoon of plot-planning and character-defining. Goes to show that we really never know where our ideas come from. I am just glad that, eventually, they come.