The first of the real autumn storms swept in tonight and the wind is currently howling through the tall trees near our house. You can always tell when a storm is coming by the rooks who spend the few hours before preparing their impossibly positioned nests and boarding up the windows. Smaller birds have spent the last couple of weeks clustering themselves into flocks to find the last autumn berries and whisping between hedgerows in collective panic. On a lane late this morning I had an escort of a hundred or more goldfinches for a couple of hundred yards between the last of the golden orange clad beeches.

Tomorrow the glorious palette of colours of this autumn in Perthshire will be gone, spread across innumerable acres of fields and roads and the occasional lawn. A very long warm summer and very dry autumn combined to paint the countryside this year in colours that would challenge any artist not to believe in a deity with an appreciation of beauty, but tonight he (or she) is wiping the canvas clean and tomorrow will start another work for our delight.

For those who are forced, or choose, to live in towns and especially cities, these seasonal changes mean very little. Time to put anti-freeze in the car and turn up the central heating a few notches. Here on the edge of the Scottish Highlands it is a time to gather one's strength for the winter to come, to look forward to the long dark evenings, organise meetings and visits, prepare for Christmas, Hogmanay and Burns Night. Each winter here is a challenge and each Spring a victory.

But first there is Remembrance Sunday for those who gave their lives so that we could enjoy our freedom. They are still doing so, not the least in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. The red leaves of Autumn include those petals of the Flander's poppies and the proud memory of their sacrifice.