Unseasonal

Unexpected autumn summers, such as the one we had at the beginning of this month, are amazing, peculiar and weirdly distracting, I find. 

The good weather becomes something that you have to make the absolute most of before it disappears – as though you have to get in as much sun-time as possible before someone notices and switches on the cloud cover.

With this in mind, you come up with work schemes that require park visits and get nothing done, while at the same time, your winter coat, wool scarf and cotton summer dresses are all suddenly hanging on the same rail, lost in some awkward seasonal limbo.

It was weird, but it was also glorious.

 

I took these in Lyme Regis and its surrounding villages on England's south coast – the very same Lyme Regis where Louisa Musgrove falls off the pier in Persuasion and Meryl Streep gets fantastically windswept while falling off the nineteenth-century moral bandwagon in The French Lieutenant's Woman. 

Unfortunately, there were no such fallen women, literal or otherwise, when I visited. Perhaps if I go back in the winter, when the wind is high and the waves are fierce and the tourists are gone, I might see one or two.