season of sadness and street fairs

September in Oxford is an intake of breath. The crackle of the academic year starting up is just beginning, and there is an air of excitement over the city, even as the first colour begins to seep into the trees and the flowers begin to blow over. There is a sense of the work of the next year lining up, ready to take you.

We mark it with a fantastically disruptive street fair, right in the middle of town, on the first two working days of September, under the yellowing plane trees and among the fading hanging baskets.

I tend to visit in my lunch hour and usually I play the Supa Froggit Game, but over the years the endless malleting of the rubber frogs have degraded them first to leglessness, then unrecognisability, and this year I guess they had gone beyond the pale. So I played Poo in the loo (above) instead. I won an emoji poo, which felt very 2016. The kitten loves it.

As is often the case, the work of the year has come tumbling in with a crash. Summer is over, and real life begins, with all the tragedy and difficulty that entails. Farewell summer, sing it out, the Colourfield.