Perfect September

A perfect September day, sunshine still warm enough to suggest the summer, not a breath of wind, the light motionless in the leaves, as if the sunlight itself was gently changing their colour. Whole banks of bracken on the hill seem to have begun to turn overnight, from green to a chalky plum red and then to russet and bronze. The sunlight reached the courtyard for the first time in days, although of course the sun is a little lower in the sky every day.

We spent yesterday morning in a cellar in Hereford, hanging J's exhibition for h.Art week which began today. Most of Hereford's back streets around the Cathedral are medieval, with Georgian facades. The cellar belongs to White Hall, a stone tile company, and they have transformed the cellar into a display space - white walls and subtle spotlights - which coincidentally makes a great space for displaying art. The work celebrates journeys and the surfaces of stone, and includes some carved roof tiles which are perhaps 500 years old. The cellar still has the heavy wooden ceiling beams and an old brick arch (the hidden supports of the city) in its darkest corners; the age of beams older by a century or more than the building itself never fails to astonish me. A hard morning's work, but a beautiful exhibition and a gentle, autumnal occupation, hanging art works in a medieval cellar.