With the change in seasons, I’d been casting around for something a bit different to read and my eyes alighted on a Jeeves book by P.G. Wodehouse. It has been a long time since I’d read a Jeeves book, it was just the thing to lift my mood. For those who don’t know the stories, they are about a man called Bertie Wooster who employs a butler called Jeeves. I opened the book and there was a passage in which Jeeves quotes Keats’s Ode to Autumn:

I reached out a hand from under the blankets, and rang the bell for Jeeves.

“Good evening, Jeeves.”

“Good morning, sir.”

This surprised me.

“Is it morning?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you sure? It seems very dark outside.”

“There is a fog, sir. If you will recollect, we are now in Autumn – season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”

“Season of what?”

“Mists, sir, and mellow fruitfulness.”

Now there’s a cracking good poem to read aloud on a misty Autumn morning:

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

And so it was that I set out up the muddy farm track to find Fairy Hole and Summer Lodge Tarn. The lane wended its way through the mist, past cottages with apple trees, and wayside hazels in the hedges that had some leaves gold and others still green, and empty calyxes the colour of emeralds scattered around beneath, left by jays or squirrels who had taken the nuts already.

In the Jeeves stories, Bertie Wooster was a man who seemed to be constantly distracted by one thing or another, living in a parallel universe whose only hold on reality was through careful tending by Jeeves.

As I walked up the lane I was also distracted into another world, though by different sorts of things to those experienced by Bertie Wooster. Crossing a footbridge by the ford just before Summer Lodge farm I was diverted by the scent of Sweet Cicely that grew in such profusion that I stepped on a few plants and released its wonderful aroma.

At the path leading to Fairy Hole I was distracted again, this time by ropes leading down the steep side of the gill, set up as a hand rail. I followed them down to the tiny cave entrance, where there was a row of ropes, each about the length of a dog lead, and each with a carabiner clip and a number. Strange I thought, there is no-one around for miles, what could this be.

I walked on in puzzlement, up past the old lead mines towards Summer Lodge Tarn. Then my query was answered when I looked down from the height of the moor. For suddenly on the path above Fairy Hole there was a group of about a dozen children wearing red overalls and white hard hats. The penny dropped – the numbered leads with their carabiner clips were to count the children in and out of the cave. If the cave-guide had a left-over lead or two, then they’d know to go back down and rescue the missing persons.

Do you ever get distracted and then have realisations? And are there any Moodscopers who’ve read the Jeeves books and enjoyed them?

Rowan on the Moor

A Moodscope member