Slowly day by day autumn's golds are giving way to winter's silvers, browns and blues. In the village the rooks and jackdaws are in disputatious mood sitting high in their trees watching us mortals go about our business.

The bird feeders in the garden are doing a great trade, swopping coal and long tailed tits with blue tits, greenfinches, chaffinches, siskins and sparrows, the dance all overseen by the red-jacketed robin perched on his wheelbarrow.

The days are already cold, even with a blue sky, and in the surrounding fields whole paratroops of gulls are dedicated to following any tractor even contemplating pulling a plough. Watching and listening to them following a plough as it turns over line after line of rich brown earth is one of the true pleasures of living in the countryside.

And the talk in our marvellous local Cooperative is all about whether Scotland will triumph over Italy tomorrow and what a sorry lot the poor English are, in a footballing sense. It is a kind of reassurance against the cold days and the colder nights.