Autumn, grand despoiler of beauty, and truth-teller

So autumn has come again, with her blushing and animating hand, searing and spotting, tinting and flaming, making hectic and encrimsoning, concealing decay, death and coming annihilation behind a mesmerising anarchy of colour. I have been out painting, down in Somerset, trying to get down on my oblongs of Whatman the blazing furnaces of reds, yellows and golds in my garden, beyond it and beyond the place where the indigenous fowl — geese, ducks and chickens mostly — fend off the rooks which raid their food from the darkening sky, a line of gilded birches glitter fantastical against the dark green fields. Autumn does not last: there is one perfect day when the entire chromatic symphony strikes a note of angelic harmony, with the sky a perfect eggshell blue if you are lucky, and you must grab that one day and paint furiously before the winds strike a hideous discord and blow away the enchantment.