Pink skies © J Darley

I’m a fan of summertime. Warm days, sunshine, a world full of thriving wildlife and flourishing greenery - what’s not to like? This passion means that often at this time of year I feel a flutter of foreboding. But not this year. This year I’ve fallen in love with autumn skies so dramatic that summer seems pale in comparison.

October has been generous with its colour palette. One advantage of shorter days is later sunrises, which means that when I walk to the train station I’m treated to visual acrobatics as astonishing pinks, pale blues, frail gold and silver somersault through the air, so slowly they seem only to seep.

Then in the evening I arrive home to floods of apricot, copper and peach so intense I wish I was a painter so I could attempt to capture a sense of the overwhelming the richness. If I saw someone wearing a dress in these colours I would either envy them their boldness, or dismiss their taste as gaudy.

Nature seems to be putting in one final, heartfelt effort, as wildflowers soak up the remaining heat from the season, squirrels bounce by and, this morning, the river’s lone cormorant raised his thread-beaked profile to greet me.

This cormorant is an old familiar. Once as I walked in to town I watched him wrestle an enormous eel on to the slick riverbank where the pair fought like something out of a vintage dinosaur movie, until a greedy gull swooped in to rob the cormorant of his prize.

This morning, however, there was no drama - merely a moment of contemplation in the early light that made me smile.