Autumn swansong

I was expecting a conflagration this autumn after the hot, dry summer. In my head I had a vision of the autumn of 2007, though I don't know if the brilliance of the foliage that year was exceptional, or if my state of mind at the time just made it seem like the world was on fire.   

Anyhow, it hasn't been like that at all - more a long, slow burn which is now dying down. Today I noticed that the leaves on the ground more black than gold. The trees more bare than leaved. The fog dropping. 

Winter is coming, so here's autumn's swansong ...

... though actually it's the resident heron on the lake in Eastville Park that draws the attention of passers-by - and the local black-headed gulls.

Meanwhile, I've been wondering which of these two photos to submit to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition - it's so hard to choose between them. ☺

The park and nearby Wickham Glen were looking so beautiful the last few times I've been there.

Wickham Glen

my favourite little ash tree by the Frome

Meanwhile, the yew that had recently fallen across C*lston Hill, largely blocking it, has been removed ... 

... only for a second tree to fall just a little higher up the lane. It's a sobering reminder of the potential danger of walking in woods after a period of drought.

Further upstream, Snuff Mills, the narrow wooded valley of which is dark in winter and darker still in summer, has been looking its best.

Quarry below Ham Lane

Glenfrome weir

We also walked up the mossy lane to Vassal's Park a couple of times, which has some fabulous trees.

ring-necked parakeet and crow

High above this section of the Frome is Purdown, which we've also visited a lot. Yes, it can be a bit edgy and urban ...

... but it's had its moments of beauty too. 

my favourite oak in the woods on Purdown

One just-after dawn morning I was reminded of the stunning sunrises I watched around New Year and the fact that even winter has its highlights, despite the cold and dark. I look forward to doing that again over the next couple of months, if any bright, clear days coincide with my days off. 

There are more spectacular trees at Ashton Court, of course, above the River Avon, though the one morning we were there it was dull and wet, which made for less than spectacular photos.

Badock's Wood has been lovely ... 

... though I was sad to see that the bench I used to sit on to remember my parents and my darling Ted has now gone. Inevitable, I suppose.

I never expect to find much hoggin in autumn, because of all the leaf litter, but I have come across a few bits. (It's the looking, and staying in the moment to look, that is most important for me.) 

Fungi spotting is also a useful trick for keeping me present. There's been masses this autumn, though they're mostly waning now.

Our final walking spot has been Blaise estate. Here are just a few of the lovely old trees in the open space near the Henbury Road entrance, which are at their most striking in autumn ... 

... though perhaps the most beautiful walks of all have been along Hazel Brook (a tributary of the River Trym) and Kings Weston Down on bright Sunday mornings (followed by a cappuccino in the cafe, and doggy ice cream for Cwtch).

Though at times there might be an ocean between us ... 

... I have the two best walking companions in the world.

Autism, ADHD and me

I realised some years ago that I probably have ADHD. The waters had long been muddied by trauma-related dissociation, but even as the years passed and the fallout from my marriage started to fade, my distractibility persisted, familiar from earliest childhood and embedded in a mind with no idea how to stay in the moment and be still.  

Eventually I got my act together and earlier this year, I went to see one of our local GPs. At the end of our ten-minute appointment, she looked me in the eye and said 'Well, I'm pretty sure you do have ADHD, but I also think you have autism'. 

I was dumbfounded. Two of my four children had been diagnosed with autism at the ages of four and three in the early 1990s, and I thought I knew all about the condition and the diagnostic process. 

'But I don't tick any of the boxes of the Triad of Impairments,' I protested.

She laughed. 'That's very old school!' she said. 'We diagnose it differently these days, and the hyperfocus and sensory overload you just described definitely indicate autism. I'd refer you for assessments for both if I could work out how to do it.'

Intellectually it made sense. I was aware of what's informally known as AuDHD, of course - it's hard to be on social media, in my sort of bubble, and miss it. And I had to agree that a lot of the tricky contradictions a combination of autism and ADHD might throw up (and hurl around your head like roof tiles in a high wind) felt all too familiar.

But emotionally it was another matter altogether. My little family had been considered an anomaly back in the day, with not one, but two small, non-verbal children a considerable way along the autistic spectrum at a time when autism wasn't thought to be hereditary.  As a result, we'd been invited to participate in several medical studies over the years, and I always said yes, thinking the research might help other families in my position. 

But in all that time, not one of the many medical personnel we encountered ever suggested that I too might be autistic. The only finding that was ever remarked upon was my score in the word recognition section of one of the tests we underwent: the highest they'd recorded to date. (I did rather less well on the spatial reasoning test.)

In the event, my GP referred me for just an ADHD assessment, as that seemed to me to be the condition most relevant to my daily experience, but sure enough, when my assessment came around months later, my eventual diagnosis was combined ADHD (hyperactive and attention deficit) with autistic traits.  

Again, there's lots of processing to be done, and it's going to take a long time. In the immediate aftermath, I feel I need to reframe my whole life, to pick through everything that happened to me, and perhaps view myself and the decisions I made a little less harshly than I have up until now. In that respect, this diagnosis will, I think, turn out to be a relief. 

But at the same time, I grieve that it's taken me 64 years to get to the point where I might start to understand myself, and allow myself the same compassion I extend to others. And I grieve for earlier me: for the avid six-year-old reader, who, once her books had fewer pictures and longer blocks of text, found herself reading the same page over and over without taking any of the content in, and convinced herself she'd somehow forgotten how to read, but was too ashamed to tell anyone; for the teen who loved her friends but found their company and the shifting of group dynamics draining (and still does); for the exhausted young mother with no emotional support and no ability to self-care, who gave up any chance of a career to look after her children on a promise from her husband he had no intention of keeping; for the woman entering middle age, who felt she had no choice but to keep her head down and put up with it all and who completely lost what sense of self she had in the process.  I've always known those years were hard, but I never realised quite how hard until now. 

At the same time, I can celebrate the leaps that allow me to write poems that seem to come from nowhere, and an ability to hyperfocus that makes even essay-writing exhilarating and infuses the most mundane of dog walks with an intensity that's addictive. 

I'm grateful to those who have stuck by me regardless - my lovely, long-suffering partner, three of my children, successive dogs who have loved me unconditionally, my longtime friends and wider family, my friends in poetry, and my publishers, who've enabled me to realise the one dream I held onto through all those years not once but seven times. I love them all, with every bit of my distractible, avoidant, oh-look-squirrels being.