Grey with a hint of purple.

Everything's gone grey with a hint of purple. Which is nice. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy riding into night. Watching the lying sun sinking behind Peak hills. A cat that looks like a badger in the half light, but is still a cat. A dim pheasant playing verge roulette. A field full of long-lashed alpacca. Or were they vicuña? Back lanes littered with a criss-cross matrix of twigs. An owl spread out wide and swooping ahead in the gloom.  A hint of somewhere in the middle chill in the air. And an understated shadow of winter just over the horizon.

Out oF Time

November. Dark, brooding, not quite winter, not quite autumn. The sound of water evicted by the tyre treads of passing cars and spat into the night. Cold enough for longs. Drowsy. Lazy. Pilot light glowing in a far buried corner waiting for full gas.

A Rat.

Coffee.

A semblance of will.

Shuffling exit delayed by sartorial dithering. Baggies? Over longs? And what's that in the pocket? Gel, ace.  Flavour? A small, orange sachet of sun-block - 'Sun Shots - Five Star UVA Protection'. Blinking and cringing, out of season, out of time.

A small, sweet reminder of summer.

Deposited in the sundries pot. Replaced with matching orange Go Gel.

And out the door.

Autumn

It's fantastic out right now. Enough recent rain to damp down dried-out loose trails and hold them together but not so much that things are draggy and sludgy. The Shooting Cabin is a primo ribbon of white, quarzite sandpaper dotted with currant bun gritstone boulders and improbably fast and grippy.

Crested the climb last night to see folded alp-style summits layered across the skyline in the last of the evening sun and just stood and gawped. No rushing, no hammering, just a steady, smooth cruise into the light then down the not quite legal narrow singletrack that clings to gorse-smothered hillside above Kinder Reservoir then dives down into William Clough with the light dying all the while.

Then lights on and up behind the quarry and onto Chinley Churn. Tired legs still spinning away with a life of their own. Picking through puddles and rocks, following familiar lines under the water, diving directly over the ever-changing rock step then. Stop. Gawp. Huge hanging moon filling the sky like a cartoon still. Breathtaking.

Chilly now with cold hands, colder for being dunked along with the rest of my body in a Jon-sized puddle on top of Middle Moor. Rail the descent, tip-toe through the walk-through garden, then the dive down Highgate Lane into Hayfield, fly in and don't touch the brakes on the narrow singletrack for rushing gorse-lined speed.

All that's left is the trundle back home, salivating tragically at the thought of fish and chips and tea. And the reality is at least as good as the imagining. Summer? It's over-rated...