Greg Hill:
It is day, wet and grey and autumn pale. The woods are dangling yellow leaves and the forest floor is strewn with sodden shades of brown. This is the time for mushrooms and toadstools; there are puffballs down under the crumbling platform in the empty railway yard, and more amidst the polypody ferns in the wood. Further up the woodland path, in the shade of a great beech, some strange fungal growth covers an old tree stump. Like lots of little purple eggs clustered together, it is, with larger jelly-like blobs here and there. Looking up from this I hear a familiar tic-tic-tic' and see the robin perched on a twig above me. They seem to make themselves scarce in the late summer and become prominent again only when the young have grown their red breast feathers in the autumn. Or maybe it's just the thinning foliage that makes them easier to spot. I leave him to his search for food and return to my own larder. Sitting by the window sipping tea and gazing out at the fading splendour of the forest I catch a movement with the corner of my eye. A spider runs across its web, grabs a tiny fly, drops it, then hangs down on a thread to catch it again, and retreats to the crack in the window-sill corner where it lurks in wait for another victim...
It is night, blue and silver and wispy white. Mist pales the dark hollows and blurs the shapes of trees. Down in the valley we stand as in a cloud, but above the sky is clear and the deep blue is jewelled with silver. The ancients saw shapes in the sky that we cannot discern, but sometimes we may see things they would not have dreamed of. Turning my gaze from the Plough hanging low in the north, I looked east and saw, marked out by gleaming ice-like specks, the shape of a dinosaur above the dark line of the hills. What did I see? What more or less than one of a pattern of numberless figures that the eye might glimpse in the endless dark beyond. And beyond...
Nought abides but night as black as sable.