The colour palette is muted, but rich; on the trees, rust, gold and khaki of dying leaves echo on a larger scale the lichen and moss covering their trunks. On the Lydden Downs the chalkland flowers are almost gone, apart from a sudden burst of yellow from a lone tormentil. A splash of deep red rosehips, the copper light shed by the setting sun. Otherwise the spectrum is constrained. No, not constrained, rather compressed; all variation of colour and hue is there, but within a shorter range between light and dark; a more subtle display after the summer’s exuberant excess, but no less intense.

Alf and I follow the contour of the coombe, my sight always on the setting sun, his nose always on the trail of something; he experiences the world in a different way to me, but he also loves being here, in this moment. We follow the farm track under the A2 towards Temple Farm. On the high chalk plateau everything is still, as if the world is taking stock before plunging in to winter. I can just make out to the north-east, in the fading light, the cliffs of Thanet, and above them, in many shades of grey, are layers of cloud. To the south-west the sun is now shining through a providential break in the overcast, and The Light is creating magic. As we walk across a field of young cabbages, our path delineated by the paler track of trodden crop, the Georgian facade of Singledge Farmhouse (its stock brick painted with cream wash) suddenly glows gently, almost spectrally, in the twilight’s last gleaming.

Returning past Temple Farm, facing west, even the artics passing along the A2 assume a strange sort of beauty, back lit by the dying day. The traffic noise doesn’t disturb my reverie; it seems like the echo of another world, an unimportant one, an unreal one. What’s real is here, now, this moment; Alf always has lived in the moment, being a dog and thus blessed with more wisdom than mere humans, but this is something I am only just recognising as fact after sixty-two years struggling to come to terms with life.

Someone once said to me, after reading some pieces I had written, that the problem with what I wrote was that there was no narrative, no story. That’s certainly true; I have no talent for constructing a plot or creating characters. But then, neither does that have any interest for me; the world around me has all the plot, the drama, the heartache, the joy I could ever hope to experience. The endless river, the sun rising and setting, autumn following summer and spring following winter; the endless cycle of procreation and birth and life and sickness and death, of lightdarklightdarklightdark, for ever and ever.

I haven’t written for a long, long time, and I’m a bit rusty, but this is the moment I want to write about; not the past, or the future, or an invented story. None of these are real, only this moment, then the next moment, then the next. There is no story, it’s all now.