COTSWOLD HARVEST HOME

Now it's Autumn, and the clocks have gone back to ghastly winter time, which means that shades of night are drawing in not long after English teatime - and before that when the skies are overcast.

One day perhaps, we'll decide to stop this twice-a-year moving the clocks back and forth. My choice is very definitely to stick with Summer Time all year round, and I'm backed up in conversations on the subject, and by safety statistics too. All surveys point to less accidents in winter if we stopped messing about and stayed with Summer Time.

Hey ho... in the meantime, Autumn still gives us sunny days like today, with intensely blue clear  skies, peppered with puffy white, fast-moving cumulus clouds.

The low sun angle makes for interesting shadows, especially on rolling countryside, where the contours show up far more clearly than at the height of summer.

And there are plenty of rural sights to see, including this fine cauliflower-like cloud formation, bubbling up (as TV weather forecasters say it) over the horizon. This was taken on the A44 road, heading west toward the Cotswold market town of Moreton-in-Marsh, home of an excellent Tuesday market, many antique shops, a fascinating architectural reclamation specialist, and not forgetting the small-but-perfectly-formed Wellington Museum, specialising in the World War II bomber of the same name, which flew from the nearby air base during the war years.