Oxford

The berries on the elder are ripe, falling and staining both city streets and country fields alike with their purple-black juice; the last tomatoes are ripening while the plants let their leaves die off, putting all their energies into their final fruit. Dahlias and sedum - and Michaelmas daisies - flower in borders where half the pleasure comes from the russet and brown of decay. There are more hours of darkness than of light. ‘That strain again! It had a dying fall.’ Today, September 29, is Michaelmas, the Feast of St Michael and All Angels. Coming shortly after the autumn equinox, it is one of the quarter days inherited from the Middle Ages, dates which long ordered life.

“Altogether Elsewhere.” The title page of an unpublished travel book caught my eye during a recent clear-out. The author, Matthew Leeming, was a character who deserved to be famous but somehow never made it. He was imaginative, witty, fearless and greedy – wonderfully greedy. He inherited his father’s ceramics company and ran it for years with great success. He loved being rich. “Money,” he used to say wistfully, “eases the pain of being alive.” To pique women’s interest, he claimed to be off-limits. ‘I’m training for the priesthood,’ he confided He invented businesses out of thin air. In Oxford he lived in a neighborhood called St. Clement’s and he created a summer school by printing a ream of luxury notepaper with an imposing letterhead: “St.