MOWING the lawn last Saturday for the second time in ten days, I did my best to steer the cumbersome old machine around a patch of flowering violets.

Mine is not the only garden to be blessed with an incongruent mix of extended summer bloom and spring flowers, such as bluebells, poking confused foliage through the earth. Moreover, wild flowers – even varieties of snowdrops – are gracing hedgerows with an unseasonal presence.

Lengthening autumns have become a feature of late and while global-warming denialists would argue it is simply a result of nature’s natural cycle, there is no doubt that the seasons are in confusion the world over.

Four weeks to the shortest day of the year, and nearly a month to Christmas, we are basking in temperatures more akin to May and facing water restrictions.

Turn the clock back a year and high pressure over Norway had brass monkeys throughout the British Isles reaching for thermal underwear and our little rock was blanketed in snow.

It may be a tried, tested and over-egged cliché but there’s no denying that we live in a funny old world.

But who’s complaining? We are waking to glorious sunrises, temperatures are above average and, as evenings and nights are relatively balmy, heating systems can be kept low – if turned on at all. What a godsend this must be for the elderly in our community who exist on tight budgets and for whom the cost of heating is a perennial worry.

At a time when relations with Europe are being tested to the extreme we Brits can at least thank the Continent for the southerly wind keeping its icy easterly counterpart at bay.

There is something very comforting about a wind from the south at this time of the year. It carries on it a particular odour to conjure up images of clear blue skies, crickets singing to deafening levels and summer idylls of days gone by.

Any illusion that winter may forget to call is shattered by a trip to large garden centres which, since Halloween overkill, have been transformed into Christmas emporiums packed from floor to ceiling and wall to wall with every conceivable shape and size of bauble, enough tinsels and garlands to girdle the world twice round, and lighting systems to suck the national grid dry – let alone the Island’s supply.

It speaks volumes for a society where a fake Christmas tree costs more than the less fortunate have to spend on their entire festivities.
In spite of basking in Mediterranean conditions, the scaremongering national tabloids continue their annual rite of prophetic warnings of Arctic conditions to come.

Since August, newspapers have warned of snow and frosts in September – which is not untypical in the Scottish Highlands or on top of lofty moorland – so hardly a portent of a climatic Armageddon before Easter. Still, it will soon be the flu season so expect the next supposed pandemic to shortly push the weather from the news pages. Last week proved to be a colourful one all round and not just because of the burnished autumn canopy and unseasonal blooms.

As UK relations with the EU continue to sour in face of bullying from the German and French leaders, and the Eurozone crisis intensifies, our very own beloved politicians were busy sorting out the pecking order for the next three years.

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but cynical old yours truly was a tad disappointed by the outcome. The euphoria of election night, in hindsight the result of imbibing a glass or more of an excellent New Zealand sauvignon blanc, was left truly deflated.

So much for the sweeping broom of a new Chief Minister and the expressed resolve of Members to oust certain of their number from the top echelon of power, as six ministers have their feet still firmly under the same tables. The promised change of direction has only introduced three new faces to the Coterie of Ministers, which it most disappointing.

They say if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it but unless I am massively out of touch with public opinion, what happened to the tide of dissatisfaction with the way the Island was being governed by the previous administration? It plainly failed to breach the defensive sandbags that surround the bastion of civic and political power.

Isn’t that usually the outcome? Three years ago Barack Obama was swept to office on a tidal wave of change yet the rhetoric that united America to elect the first black president has, as so often happens, failed to deliver.
If last month’s elections have failed to deliver a dynamic new future, let us hope that the Overseas Aid Commission has a change of heart when considering whether to donate money to the outspoken UK charities who do the most good in the underprivileged Third World.

Oxfam, Christian Aid and Action Aid are respected and well-run organisations run and staffed by people who put others before self. They are the first to arrive when aid is desperately needed and now how to make money work to best effect.

As Christmas approaches and we are all asked to dig deeper in our pockets to help those in need at home and overseas it is worth remembering the true message that tends to get lost in all the seasonal hype.
In the words of Jesus who, after all, Christmas is supposed to be about, ‘it is more blessed to give than to receive.’