On the eve of the Autumn Equinox I looked out of my kitchen window and was surprised to see a little flock of birds flittering around the empty bird feeders. I haven’t been putting food out for them over the summer because there should be plenty in the garden and meadows, so rightly or wrongly, I think that the birds are better off eating a varied natural diet rather than peanuts and fat balls. 

In the morning I felt guilty. When the early morning low pale dawn sun came creeping up the dale it lit up meadows white with ground frost. The local weather station reported a low of minus 2.2 degrees Celsius. The birds must have known the frost was coming and were looking for easy food the night before.

To assuage my guilt I found the leftovers from last winter’s stock of bird feed and filled up the feeders with seeds, peanuts and fat balls. They’re very busy now with coal tits, blue tits, great tits, chaffinches, the occasional goldfinch and bustling groups of sparrows. Every now and then a pheasant appears on the top of the hedge and bumbles their way down to peck at fallen seeds. I’ll replenish my stocks when I’m next in town. Judging by the activity around the feeders it won’t take long for the birds to get through last season’s remnants. 

I’m coming up for a big change. I retire at the end of September. I’ve been planning it for a long time, especially my pension to make sure I’d be able to have enough. But also moving to a house that didn’t need to be in a place where I could commute from, and that is deeper in the wilds of the dales.

I’ll be continuing with a couple of hours a week of work to ease the transition for my employer so that I can advise on a few ongoing projects, which is also nice as it keeps a bit of a connection with both colleagues and clients. But that’s a very different role to being in the steady drumbeat of rustling up business, overseeing project creation, building teams and implementation.

It will take a bit of getting used to. I’ve got a couple of overseas holidays lined up and that will help with the realisation that my rhythm will be more of my own and the seasons and not dictated by working life. There is still quite a bit of unravelling to do though and I have to switch into the self-motivation and discipline of being a writer.

Have you had major inflection points in your life, planned or unplanned, and how did you adjust and cope with them?

Rowan on the Moor

A Moodscope member