My eyes are doors. The moon walks through them.

And now that a brief Indian summer's faded into the traditional concrete-coloured British autumn, I'm coming home to this journal. I meant to for months, but didn't want it to be full of the depression and anger most of us are feeling now.  Facebook posts are really a just a moment's satisfaction, a note of things, so here I am. 

My reading lately has turned towards local history and lore, mostly through happy-accidental finds in charity shops. I picked up Ernest J. Beavan's Damson By The Pound last week. It's an account of growing up in rural Warwickshire in the Twenties and Thirties; actually my very neck of the woods - Beavan's first few years were spent on my very street. He doesn't give a house number, but from hints he drops I think his childhood home might have been just across the road from where I'm writing now. Then he moved just up the way to the neighbouring village of Elmdon Heath. At times it's hard to read - like wading through Warwickshire clay. chatty and yet formal; and a lot of cries of Is this progress? But then again there are vivid memories. The local gasworks sound like an industrial version of Hell. There was a pub callled The Anchor nearby (gone before my time); Beavan relates how his gamekeeper uncle walked in one night to find it smogged from a blocked fireplace. His solution: to clear it by emptying both barrels of his shotgun up the chimney. Then there's all-too-briefly mentioned Miss Raven, black-clad, often with a parrot on her shoulder: a second-hand clothes dealer better known for reading palms or tea-leaves.  Paths called "The Gossies" for the gorse bushes that fringed them, bathing pools long since filled in, gamekeepers, local squires, sparrowhawks and hares - it's hard to graft this on to the Elmdon Heath I know; it got developed a hell of a lot more than Catney ever did. But since I put the book down I've been trying to imagine the fields under the suburb. The other thing is Arthur Mee's The King's England: Warwickshire. I think he covered every English shire in the Thirties. Amiable guides with a note on every village and town the researchers could cover, more for dipping into than cover-to-cover reading. Acording to Mee, a Selly Oak college held a golden glass chalice reputed to have been used at the Last Supper; I wonder what became of it? It's amusing to think Brummie Quakers might have held the Grail in the last century. (Most of the area became the West Midlands in the mid-seventies, boundaries jumping like a skipping rope. I'm sure there are still a few round  who rue that decision; I'm not one of them. Though we were getting post marked Warwickshire well into the Eighties.)

Still in local news: my local The Boat has closed its doors and will be reopening as... The Mulberry Bush. I have no idea why they're changing the name. Why ignore over a century of being a canalside pub in favour of a twee "rural" name? I don't care for it - and there's only so much innuendo you can get out of the obvious new diminutive.  The Barge Inn is a terrible pun, but at least it'd be in the spirit of the canals.

I've been getting a lot of moth visitors at night lately. Cue lunging towards my books on insects and flipping through trying to get an ID. I'm sure there are mobile apps that'll do the job for you from a photo, but it feels like cheating and my phone's not that smart. Some names from the guestbook: the Silver-Y, Brimstone, Common Rustic, Setaceous Hebrew Character. I try and escort them out if I can; but often they seem to find their own way out. I've seen them straining against my window. The electric light glints off the facets of their eyes: the tiniest flashes of jewel-colours, precious metals. The wings are often muted: cryptic patterns in dun or sable or tawny; I love them nonetheless. One night I heard a soft thumping outside. A bat had come to eat their fill, flitting away as I opened the curtain.