Chip Tolson

Sitting on the terrace in my dressing gown, with a mug of coffee and binoculars, as one does, at 3.00 am, I watched the ‘Super Moon Eclipse’. What was striking was how long the red Earth shadow was lasting, hours rather than the minutes we’ve seen with eclipses of the sun. I guess that is due relative distances. And it wasn’t as cold as recent nights, down to 2C the night before. At 6C it felt mild.

This is a modest photo compared with those on media broadcasts, but it was taken with my phone. The wonderful thing was that here on Exmoor the night skies are unpolluted from man-made light – other than when the cat set off the yard light – and the sky was clear, no clouds, so that stars in their millions and billions and huge distances could be seen from horizon to horizon.

Toward half past four the brilliance faded as a veil of cloud came over. The super moon’s eclipse was a sight to remember; I’ll be in my nineties when the next opportunity comes in the 2030s.

My last post was wrong – the moon eclipse is in the early hours of Monday, 28th, between 3 and 5am, total at 3.57 hrs. Who will be up for that – I hope I will; early bed tonight.

Four days on from the Autumn Equinox and the weather is set fair for days of sunshine and overnight cold; last night we had a ground frost sugar dusting the grass in the valley. Leaves are turning to rich colours, the trees dropping their summer growth to open up the views through the woodland where spider webs trail across the trees and in the field early morning sheep trails through the dew show their grazing paths. A good harvest of crab apples is weighing down the tree boughs.

I think we can claim these last days of September – and hopefully the first few in October – to be an Indian Summer. The phrase is nothing to do with the colonial days of the Raj, but the fine autumn hunting and cropping prairie season of the Native Americans and the First Canadians.

Skeins of geese fly over in the early morning , some in tens, other close on a hundred, moving up from Wimbleball to glean the harvest fields and return as the sun heats the day for the large birds to loiter on the lake shore. And where are the swallows? Only last week the last brood, maybe the third brood, was on the wing delighting round the barn. This morning there is no sign of them. Safe away brave birds and safe return next April from your African winter.

In the early hours of Tuesday MONDAY – I got it wrong! -we must watch the moon as it is eclipsed in the earth’s shadow turning dust red and the full moon pulling major tides onto our shores.

And it isn’t only small boys who go scrumping for apples.

There is so much happening, can we forget – or forgive – the wet summer and hope for a mild winter?

www.chiptolson.com

Quick visit last night to The Old Ship Aground Inn, Minehead, for a pre-match meal, and there was a ‘shout’.

The RNLI launched both their RIBS, the smaller in the water first, then the larger Atlantic Rib, down across the pebble beach and into the water to head fast due west along the coast, the southern shore of the Bristol Channel.

Exciting.      

And by the way, The Old Ship Aground Inn does excellent chips.

Away goes the larger boat – the smaller is off before it, follow the wake!

On this day, 17th September 1959, I caught the train from Bridgwater, via Bristol and Shrewsbury to Oswestry, and by the evening I was Gunner Tolson, J 23……- I won’t give the whole number – I still use it! And so my Army national service began.

And so it was for Archie Middlebrook, the protagonist of my novel, Requiem for Private Hughes in 1953, but he was posted to Malaya. I served in Germany at an uneventful time, until the first bricks of the Berlin Wall were laid as I left Germany and the Army.

A happy coincidence that my novel is now available on Amazon both as an e-book and a paperback. Oh, perhaps I should  classify it as 15+. Enjoy.

Is now published as an e-book on Amazon, and will follow as a paperback shortly. This is an exciting day – for me. The story has been with me for many years, gradually building. It is good to see it in print.

Now for the next novel, Puffball – this is set here in West Somerset with a link to Kyoto, in Japan.

No, not the opening of a Lewis Carol piece, but what is going on here in the autumn season.

Every year, some years more profuse than others, and this is a good year, huge Parasol mushrooms grow up near the wedding ground. Here is one with a rather bored dog told to sit beside it to show scale. You can eat them, but in truth they are pretty tough and lacking in taste.

And here are winter cabbages and cauliflowers planted out in re-used builder’s bags, not ideal raised beds, but they work and we have rhubarb and have had two year’s potatoes from them – well, a third year growing from those we failed to harvest twelve nonths earlier.

My novel REQUIEM FOR PRIVATE HUGHES will be published this month – as an e-book, then as a paperback – watch this space.

Archie Middlebrook, a West Somerset art student is called up for national service to serve in The Malayan Emergency. Blown up in a terrorist ambush, his friend and driver killed, can twenty-year old Archie’s life at home in Somerset be unchanged?

<- E-book cover.

“Three miles distant Second Lieutenant Peterson heard an explosion, later a thump, and saw a billowing cloud of dark smoke rise above the rolling jungle landscape.”

Most of us have heard of Route 66, the iconic road trip across the United States. Now it has a rival – Route 500. This is a circumnavigation of the North of Scotland. It begins and ends in Inverness and you can chose to go clockwise or anti-clockwise, as the mood takes you.

By happy chance, years ago, Clare and I have travelled the route, or the most parts of it. From our then home in Linlithgow we motored into the Central Highlands, over to the West Coast, north to Durness and along the North Coast. We then crossed from Scrabster to Stromness for a wonderful week in Orkney exploring its neolithic past, then back to Sutherland and home via Inverness.

I guess I did the equivalent again a few summers later in a 1930s yacht from Oban, through the Caledonian Canal, across Loch Ness, out into the North Sea for Orkney and after a couple of days, home by way of Cape Wrath, inside Skye under the Kyle of Lochalsh bridge and on past Ardnamurchan and the Sound of Mull to Oban. As I remember it was a stormy homeward voyage with day-long passages with no sight of land.

Maybe I’ve done ‘Route 500’ twice, but I’m eager to go again planning my journey with the aid of the detailed Route 500 website to pick fine dining and comfortable hostelries along the way. Maybe not in the winter months, in the summer months of long daylight and, fingers crossed, sunny days.