I have been reluctant to post my blogs over the last few months of lockdown and its aftermath here in Lewes, UK. I didn’t feel I had much to add to the millions of comments about the pandemic over the last eighteen months as I am convinced that no one would be interested in what it was like to be a privileged, white, no-longer young, middle class European male during the.time when so many people suffered so much more than I have locked-in here in my two-hundred year old terraced house with lots of narrow stairs in a beautiful historic town in south-east England.

And anyway, not much really changed for a writer like me. Like most of my kind, I don’t really go out much anyway and I mostly work alone in a small room with a computer and some books. So there aren’t many dramas here. OK, I shaved off my beard for a bit and then regrew it.

I tended my small urban garden and watched the seasons change out there in my small piece of England.

I was able to not just carry on keeping fit with my personal trainer Gyles Abbott at Soulfit Studios https://www.wearesoulfit.com/about-soulfit but I have got fitter than I have been for years.

I actually took on extra fitness training too with Soulfit’s Kieran Brooks, an enthusiastic and dynamic former baller-dancer, who is now giving me regular one-to-one classical ballet lessons. It began as a bit of a ‘could-I-dare-I’ challenge to myself and it has turned out to be more than a short-term experiment. I’m loving finding something so different and so inspirational at a time in my life when I’d thought I already knew all of my abilities and limitations.

I have also been carrying on with learning Italian and, after reaching a 687 day streak with the online languages app Duolingo have taken on a new online teacher, an excellent Sicilian, based in Venice, called Elio Ministeri – he is taking me through my paces and picking up on my many errors.

And, as I did before the pandemic, I’ve carried on writing poetry and fiction – some publication dates have slipped because of lockdown, but, even with the pandemic, I had some more Fibonacci poetry published in the online journal The Fib Review http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/index.html

One of the poems even commemorated my beard – the other one was about life, age and death. I suppose that was inevitable after the passing of my mother in April at the grand age of 106. I locked down a bit after her death, not just in mourning for an extraordinary woman, but also for an end to an era in my life and the life of my family and, inevitably, all the duties that fell to me in sorting out her estate. I will honour her memory and her long interesting life in a later blog, I hope.

Here in the UK, we are seeing the ending of the pandemic restrictions, and the beginnings of hope for the future. I share that hope and I am beginning to celebrate the feeling of coming out of my cage. I haven’t seen many of you for a long time now, but lets get back together soon and, I promise, I shall come back to this website which has been masterfully restored and improved by an amazingly patient man called Matt Artley.

So much remains the same and much has changed during this difficult time. The season is changing again too as we move towards September so, for today, I will leave you with signs of fruition – the apples and tomatoes are ripening with high summer flowers outside by my dustbins. See you all soon.

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My little apple tree has been a source of pleasure all year and this weekend its season reached its climax with an unusually large amount of bright red fruit ready for picking here in my Lewes, UK, garden.

This is a French variety of dessert apple called Croquella which is grown as a miniature tree and which works well in my small urban garden. Not only are its fruits like Christmas tree decorations from summer to autumn but the blossom is one of my favourite flowers. This is what it looked like in April this year.

In 2014 it didn’t blossom at all and there was no fruit last year so I was doubly pleased to so it in bloom this time round in the seventh year since I planted the tree as a tiny sapling.

For a moment, this weekend, I regretted that the time for picking had arrived because these little red balls have been so decorous out there in my garden.

Harvest-time has its own imperatives and I followed its orders on a lovely sunny weekend.

It always amazes me how much fruit is produced by this plucky little tree but this year has seen a bumper crop.

With the apples picked and stored, my garden has lost one of its seasonal highlights but the dahlias and heliotropes continue their autumnal starring role.

The passion flower too continues not only to flower but to fruit.

I wasn’t expecting this extra fruit harvest but the passion fruits taste delicious.

I’ve still got Bramley cooking apples ripening on the espalier tree too. So it’s been a successful season for fruitfulness.

These Croquella apples don’t just have pretty faces – they taste good too.

Juicy and sweet without being too sweet – just how you want an early season apple.

Some of these Croquella apples made it into a splendid and traditional harvest feast of roast pork on Saturday.

Some more of them are now sitting in the kitchen fruit bowl and the rest are stored in the garden shed – my harvest is definitely home.

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On a grey day in Lewes, I was cheered by my small apple tree deciding to sprout lily flowers as well as a good potential harvest of rosy little apples. Was it magic or was it one of my lilies hitching a lift up to the light?

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My small apple tree here in my Lewes garden has finally offered up these deliciously tempting fruits as August and Summer begins to wave us goodbye. The fruit, variety Croquella, is an early herald for Autumn and its rosiness tempers my regret for season’s end especially after this very disappointing English Summer.

A week ago, I was celebrating Summer at an alfresco dinner party in the countryside only a couple of miles from here. My indulgent friends insisted on me doing an impromptu poetry reading around the camp fire and this is one of the poems I read – I wrote it in 2009 and it was published in The Blotter magazine of November that year when my health was much frailer than it is today. It was originally written for a poetry exhibition on the subject of good and evil:

The Tale Of An Apple And A Sausage

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There is too much temptation out there in my small Lewes garden this week. Those juicy red apples flash their blushing cheeks at me everytime I look out of the window.

They are growing on the miniature tree that I planted as a glorified stick in March 2010.

And now, that wonderful fruit, like a christmas tree decoration.

The variety is Croquella and it is just asking to be eaten. My friendly serpent thinks so too – he keeps telling me to eat it.

Delicious and so far no obviously sinful consequences.

I wrote a poem about an apple once  – it was published in the November 2009 issue of The Blotter (see links). I recorded it in less hairy days when I was still recovering from my illness. Now don’t let it lead you astray.

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