Seven days - a week in the life of Fredrik Erixon
by Fredrik Erixon
18 October 2011
Monday
When the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky visited Kaliningrad in the 1960s, decades after Germany lost its eastern Prussian wing to the Soviets; he could still hear the trees "whispering in German". The ghosts of the pasts were still alive. When people returned to Brussels from the summer break some weeks ago, they returned to a city with trees whispering in an unmistakably German accent. Euroville now appears genuinely worried: are Europe's dark forces yet again to be released? But that worry is wahnsinn, and it is especially absurd when it sticks itself to Germany. It is remarkable how Brussels and Berlin have distanced themselves from each other in the past ten years. Old stereotypes of Germany are alive again, even in the city that purports to transcend national cultures. Is Germany now to Brussels what Edward Said thought the Middle East is to the west – that mythologized "other"?
Over lunch with two friends from London the discussion soon turns to something so obvious that most people in Brussels miss it. Few, if any, looks to Brussels for political leadership or policy guidance to steer the eurozone out of its economic mess. My friends wonder why? I don't. I had it explained to me already during my first year in Brussels. You have people who see trees, and you have people who see woods. Brussels, I was told, is populated by "tree people". Every big debate about the future of Europe, my friend continues, has almost passed unnoticed in the city's European quarter. Eurocrats are alien to big-picture themes. They are fine-tuning policy engineers, happy to crown their careers with a successful commitology negotiation on the size of vehicle license plates.
I leave the office around midnight. Autumn is clearly on its way. Every bench in the Trône metro station is already occupied by homeless people, who have checked in for the night. This is the start of Europe's winter of discontent, I think. And while the metro's late-evening musical fête switches to Debussy's L'enfant prodigue, a middle-aged man rises up from the bench and shouts: "It is impossible to sleep on a bench made of wood." Surely, Brussels must be the imperial city of tree people.
Tuesday
Another frenzied day in Brussels. Suddenly, it feels, the entire world has decamped here. Markets are spooked, politicians are panicky and journalists are reading tea leaves to get a sense of where it all is heading. Yet Brussels, I have come to learn, is the global capital of unhappy linguistic marriages. And this problem, too, starts at the top. Pick up any summit communiqué during a crisis and compare the English, French and German versions. The substance subtly shifts between the translations. When Nicolas Sarkozy leaves Brussels celebrating the fact that the European Union now will set up a gouvernement économique, which is French code word for political control of the European Central Bank, Angela Merkel returns to Berlin hailing her government's achievement to get agreement on a wirstschaftspolitische Steuerung - which is German code word for maintaining the ECB's independence). Strangely, it is the same summit they are referring to. So, not even Europeans have found a way to bridge the linguistic divide. Imagine, then, how foreign visitors, uninitiated to the strange rites of Brussels, feel about European politics.
After a conference presentation for a big American bank I am rushed into a private room to meet with one of its bigwigs. And there I have one of these unbelievable moments that you only see in movies like Being There - where Peter Sellers plays a simple gardener mistakenly taken for a financial wizard. The bigwig moves straight to the point and asks how "Humpty" is doing. As a paid-up member of the ironic generation, I think this is just a funny warm-up for the conversation, so I respond that not even all the king's horses and men can put Humpty back together again. "Funny, that's what I think too", the bigwig responds. "So I can tell my colleagues there is no point to go and see him", he asks. "Yes", I say, "I believe he doesn't do private meetings". And that was the end of the conversation.
So when I am rushed out of the room I ask the man, who brought me there, what the hell all this was about. He, too, is confused - but thought his boss probably had been referring to Herman Van Rompuy - who he had nicknamed "Rompty", but now mixed up with the fictional Humpty Dumpty. So I ask if we shouldn't go back and tell him that I misunderstood. No, he responds, the bigwig was pleased with the answer and that's all that matters for now. Then I am off to another meeting in the Tower of Babel – this time to speak to a group of officials from China's finance ministry. It is smooth sailing until we got to the question and answer session, when I am asked if I think there will be a new euro rescue package stitched together soon. "I don't know", I say, but if there is - it will surely be of the same G-spot caliber as the past ones. In the first instance, satisfaction, but soon everything just gets back to the squalid normal in the European public finances.
Bad idea. Bad, bad idea. The moment I say it I know I am in trouble. The west has yet to export irony to Asia. And before I got a chance to continue - the panel moderator, an elderly and pompous man, interrupts me to ask for an explanation of the G-spot. I do my best to explain female biology, but no one understands except for the only lady in the room who looks amused. I try to calm them by saying that no official – or think-tanker, for that matter – is likely to get sacked for not knowing the location of the g-spot. But I only dig myself deeper into the hole. The only thing that saves me is that I need to end the meeting to rush to the airport.
And once I have made myself comfortable on the flight I got back to my preparation for a weekend visit to Vienna by reading Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday. On crazy days like this, I really long for an uncomplicated world of yesterday. But I soon remind myself that Zweig took his life because of that world's complications. Life then was nothing but solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. So I end the day wondering if Hobbes' famous words would fit a grand opera on the decline and fall of the euro. It would have to be a heavy, Wagner-type opera; not like those light, churlish, glib, insolent chansons d'amour that pass for opera in the land of Silvio. I have always imagined Merkel as a character in a Wagner opera – as a civil, modern-day Brünnhilde, the Valkyrie in Wagner's Ring. Is now her Brünnhilde moment? Will she light the pyre that destroys the gods and herself, purifies the ring, and rejuvenates the European project?
Wednesday
The German Ministry of Finance is a port of calm amid the storm. That is my feeling when I step into the building – situated in a giant house, built in the 1930s for Göring's air ministry. Mean pundits have nodded to a connection between that past and today, suggesting Germany's finance ministry to be the modern arm of vicious Nazi-style economic oppression, or that the ministry is the airborne division of German politics: up in the sky with no connection to the real world. Few countries are as misunderstood as Germany. Michael Lewis of Liar's Poker fame had to use more than 10 pages in the September issue of Vanity Fair to explain, unsuccessfully, how Germans think. His riposte went under the belt and traced the German economic Weltanschauung back to its people's unhealthy interest in the anal region – or, more precisely, in excrement.
Today's Germany is a globalised society with people and business looking out with confidence to the rest of the world – rather than, as in the past, a society looking inwards or to Europe to discipline itself. Contrary to what many of all these new experts on Germany proclaim, it has not given up on Europe. It is just that Europe is no longer where Germans automatically look when they think of grand political and commercial strategies. But here's the catch - German politicians have not adjusted to that change. They understand that developments in China mean more for Germany's economy than what happens on Europe's Southern rim. But they don't know what it means politically – for the German political narrative.
So the problem with Merkel is not that she does not lead on Europe. Nor is the problem that she comes from a different generation of Germans – a generation that unlike Schmidt's and Kohl's, does not have its own experiences comparable to the Second World War. She is from the Cold War generation, grew up on the other side of the curtain and probably feels as strongly about freedom and unity in Europe as older German politicians. No, the problem with Merkel is that she cannot navigate the new global world and, therefore, does not lead on any issue – neither locally and nationally, nor in Europe and globally. Merkel, if I am allowed to return to Lewis's southern regions, is rather like that stomach gas in one of Anthony Burgess's novels – just wandering around in no particular direction.
Thursday
This is the big day of the week for my family. After two years of labour, my wife is releasing her new book on Swedish identity, modernity and emigration. On our way home from the launch, I start to think about how much Sweden has changed in the past decades. It is a different country than the one I grew up in. It is, for the most part, a much better country. Yet one still has to fight boredom in Sweden, especially on encounters with its political or public culture. Burgess once said of Swedish girls that they were known for blondness and blandness. I know Burgess had subterranean reasons to look away from other half, but if he had befriended the male part too he would have found blandness to be a unisexual trait.
I often think of my motherland as a bigger version of Düsseldorf. It is clean, competitive, tax-compliant and engineerial. It heralds its mini-me version of Ordnungspolitik. It is still a post-religious, industrial society. The only thing that hits a godly nerve is the cameral belief in fiscal discipline, now protected by an ear ringed and ponytailed finance minister - whose communiqués of austerity are taken as papal encyclical letters. Mind you, I like politicians keeping public expenditures on a tight leash. I also think Sweden deserves praise for its fiscal turnaround, from deficit junkie to knight of fiscal balance. The problem with Sweden is rather that it creates religions out of worldly phenomena. Now these spiritual alchemists are worshipping fiscal discipline. And it is a religion that makes the country feel jolly good about itself now that the rest of Europe is throwing itself to the dogs.
This is where the new austere, bourgeois Sweden subtly mixes with its socialist, profligate, Olof-Palmeusque past. It finds its meaning in the company of misery and crooks. It lights up in moral darkness. Palme thought he was the saviour of third-world crooks. The new Swedish Salvationists are on a mission to fiscally civilize everything south of Bavaria, east of Warsaw, and west of Oslo. Bright as a North Star, The Economist recently said of Sweden's economy. Well, Caesar, in Shakespeare's version, thought he was "constant as a Northern star" just before that fatal encounter with senate rebellions. Still, Sweden is one of the better countries this side of the galaxy.
Friday
I am up early to catch a flight to Vienna for a weekend of work and pleasure. But once I step off the flight, I realize that my true mission for the weekend is to throw myself into the spirit of European decline. Surely, that is what Vienna is for? And I find that life on that side of the fence can be jolly pleasant – especially, if it is served with kapuziner and apfelstrudel. I am being unfair to Austria. It is a country that puzzles and fascinates me. I feel an emotional obligation to like the country, do not ask me why, but I often do not understand its people.
And yet what is it I do need to understand, I ask myself as I take the floor to give a talk about Europe's strategic economic choices in the new Asian century. Here is a country with solid economic growth. Its banks are stable and Austria is not going to be the trigger of an escalating bank crisis in Europe, which it was in 1931 when Kreditanstalt collapsed. It is, for all I know, an economy that embraces globalisation and believes you can raise your affluence also at an age of European declinism, which is a rare sentiment these days. And the current government, free from that odious pink lederhosen Rambo, Jörg Haider, seems culturally avert to letting the printing press do the job that politicians cannot muster.
Perhaps history is repeating itself. Fürst von Metternich, the 19th century statesman, was an Austrian politician - but he was born in the Rhineland and could never understand the mindset of the Habsburgs. He thought that the empire did not belong in Europe. "Asia", he said, "begins at Landstrasse", the eastward road out of Vienna. That road still points toward Budapest. The distance to Asia remains the same. But mentally Vienna has moved closer to the east.
Saturday
We begin the weekend with a splendid tour of Vienna's traditional coffee houses. Our tutor, an Austrian actor, takes us around the coffee houses in central Vienna. We went for a mélange at Griensteidl and then he guides us through the history of Central, Herrenhof, Hawelka, and Bräunerhof. We are read passages from some of their Stammgasts: Alfred Polgar, Otto Friedländer, Hans Weigel, Peter Altenberg, Thomas Bernhard, and Friedrich Torberg. We learn amusing anecdotes about more famous coffee house luminaries: Freud, Mahler, Krauss, Wittgenstein, and Trotsky. And this lovely visit in the world of yesterday ends with a conversation about Viennese economists of the mid-war Austrian school: Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek.
A grand empire had collapsed, an economy was in ruin. These economists had ringside seats to the Austrian decline. Hayek founded the Konjunkturforschungsinstitut, the institute for business-cycle research, and Mises headed the Vienna Chamber of Commerce. Schumpeter, the former finance minister - bald, no earring - and financial crook who, according to his biographer rode Vienna's main boulevard with a "blond prostitute on one knee and a brunette on the other", had already started to practice his own economic doctrines. "Creative destruction" was also the motto for his financial and romantic life. In the end, they all had to leave Vienna. Looking out from his office on the busy and grand Ringstrasse, Mises told economist Fritz Machlup that all this now had to go. "Maybe grass will grow here", he said, "because our civilization will end".
Sunday
I have always disliked Sundays. It is a day that cannot decide what it is: the start or the end of a week? But this Sunday, there is much to enjoy. We start it with breakfast at Café Central and end it, at least our Viennese sojourn, with a late lunch at Café Central. In between, the only thing that moves is our discussion - from the eurozone crisis to Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos, from the Chauteau Briand at Hotel Sacher - which we feasted on after a remarkably good Straussian evening at the Staatsoper yesterday evening - to sexual habits of old German composers. I return home in the evening. My youngest son is teething. No one yet understands what the trees in Brussels are whispering. I bless autumn for its early arrival. We have a few more months then until the grass starts to grow again.
When the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky visited Kaliningrad in the 1960s, decades after Germany lost its eastern Prussian wing to the Soviets; he could still hear the trees "whispering in German". The ghosts of the pasts were still alive. When people returned to Brussels from the summer break some weeks ago, they returned to a city with trees whispering in an unmistakably German accent. Euroville now appears genuinely worried: are Europe's dark forces yet again to be released? But that worry is wahnsinn, and it is especially absurd when it sticks itself to Germany. It is remarkable how Brussels and Berlin have distanced themselves from each other in the past ten years. Old stereotypes of Germany are alive again, even in the city that purports to transcend national cultures. Is Germany now to Brussels what Edward Said thought the Middle East is to the west – that mythologized "other"?
Over lunch with two friends from London the discussion soon turns to something so obvious that most people in Brussels miss it. Few, if any, looks to Brussels for political leadership or policy guidance to steer the eurozone out of its economic mess. My friends wonder why? I don't. I had it explained to me already during my first year in Brussels. You have people who see trees, and you have people who see woods. Brussels, I was told, is populated by "tree people". Every big debate about the future of Europe, my friend continues, has almost passed unnoticed in the city's European quarter. Eurocrats are alien to big-picture themes. They are fine-tuning policy engineers, happy to crown their careers with a successful commitology negotiation on the size of vehicle license plates.
I leave the office around midnight. Autumn is clearly on its way. Every bench in the Trône metro station is already occupied by homeless people, who have checked in for the night. This is the start of Europe's winter of discontent, I think. And while the metro's late-evening musical fête switches to Debussy's L'enfant prodigue, a middle-aged man rises up from the bench and shouts: "It is impossible to sleep on a bench made of wood." Surely, Brussels must be the imperial city of tree people.
Another frenzied day in Brussels. Suddenly, it feels, the entire world has decamped here. Markets are spooked, politicians are panicky and journalists are reading tea leaves to get a sense of where it all is heading. Yet Brussels, I have come to learn, is the global capital of unhappy linguistic marriages. And this problem, too, starts at the top. Pick up any summit communiqué during a crisis and compare the English, French and German versions. The substance subtly shifts between the translations. When Nicolas Sarkozy leaves Brussels celebrating the fact that the European Union now will set up a gouvernement économique, which is French code word for political control of the European Central Bank, Angela Merkel returns to Berlin hailing her government's achievement to get agreement on a wirstschaftspolitische Steuerung - which is German code word for maintaining the ECB's independence). Strangely, it is the same summit they are referring to. So, not even Europeans have found a way to bridge the linguistic divide. Imagine, then, how foreign visitors, uninitiated to the strange rites of Brussels, feel about European politics.
After a conference presentation for a big American bank I am rushed into a private room to meet with one of its bigwigs. And there I have one of these unbelievable moments that you only see in movies like Being There - where Peter Sellers plays a simple gardener mistakenly taken for a financial wizard. The bigwig moves straight to the point and asks how "Humpty" is doing. As a paid-up member of the ironic generation, I think this is just a funny warm-up for the conversation, so I respond that not even all the king's horses and men can put Humpty back together again. "Funny, that's what I think too", the bigwig responds. "So I can tell my colleagues there is no point to go and see him", he asks. "Yes", I say, "I believe he doesn't do private meetings". And that was the end of the conversation.
So when I am rushed out of the room I ask the man, who brought me there, what the hell all this was about. He, too, is confused - but thought his boss probably had been referring to Herman Van Rompuy - who he had nicknamed "Rompty", but now mixed up with the fictional Humpty Dumpty. So I ask if we shouldn't go back and tell him that I misunderstood. No, he responds, the bigwig was pleased with the answer and that's all that matters for now. Then I am off to another meeting in the Tower of Babel – this time to speak to a group of officials from China's finance ministry. It is smooth sailing until we got to the question and answer session, when I am asked if I think there will be a new euro rescue package stitched together soon. "I don't know", I say, but if there is - it will surely be of the same G-spot caliber as the past ones. In the first instance, satisfaction, but soon everything just gets back to the squalid normal in the European public finances.
Bad idea. Bad, bad idea. The moment I say it I know I am in trouble. The west has yet to export irony to Asia. And before I got a chance to continue - the panel moderator, an elderly and pompous man, interrupts me to ask for an explanation of the G-spot. I do my best to explain female biology, but no one understands except for the only lady in the room who looks amused. I try to calm them by saying that no official – or think-tanker, for that matter – is likely to get sacked for not knowing the location of the g-spot. But I only dig myself deeper into the hole. The only thing that saves me is that I need to end the meeting to rush to the airport.
And once I have made myself comfortable on the flight I got back to my preparation for a weekend visit to Vienna by reading Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday. On crazy days like this, I really long for an uncomplicated world of yesterday. But I soon remind myself that Zweig took his life because of that world's complications. Life then was nothing but solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. So I end the day wondering if Hobbes' famous words would fit a grand opera on the decline and fall of the euro. It would have to be a heavy, Wagner-type opera; not like those light, churlish, glib, insolent chansons d'amour that pass for opera in the land of Silvio. I have always imagined Merkel as a character in a Wagner opera – as a civil, modern-day Brünnhilde, the Valkyrie in Wagner's Ring. Is now her Brünnhilde moment? Will she light the pyre that destroys the gods and herself, purifies the ring, and rejuvenates the European project?
The German Ministry of Finance is a port of calm amid the storm. That is my feeling when I step into the building – situated in a giant house, built in the 1930s for Göring's air ministry. Mean pundits have nodded to a connection between that past and today, suggesting Germany's finance ministry to be the modern arm of vicious Nazi-style economic oppression, or that the ministry is the airborne division of German politics: up in the sky with no connection to the real world. Few countries are as misunderstood as Germany. Michael Lewis of Liar's Poker fame had to use more than 10 pages in the September issue of Vanity Fair to explain, unsuccessfully, how Germans think. His riposte went under the belt and traced the German economic Weltanschauung back to its people's unhealthy interest in the anal region – or, more precisely, in excrement.
Today's Germany is a globalised society with people and business looking out with confidence to the rest of the world – rather than, as in the past, a society looking inwards or to Europe to discipline itself. Contrary to what many of all these new experts on Germany proclaim, it has not given up on Europe. It is just that Europe is no longer where Germans automatically look when they think of grand political and commercial strategies. But here's the catch - German politicians have not adjusted to that change. They understand that developments in China mean more for Germany's economy than what happens on Europe's Southern rim. But they don't know what it means politically – for the German political narrative.
So the problem with Merkel is not that she does not lead on Europe. Nor is the problem that she comes from a different generation of Germans – a generation that unlike Schmidt's and Kohl's, does not have its own experiences comparable to the Second World War. She is from the Cold War generation, grew up on the other side of the curtain and probably feels as strongly about freedom and unity in Europe as older German politicians. No, the problem with Merkel is that she cannot navigate the new global world and, therefore, does not lead on any issue – neither locally and nationally, nor in Europe and globally. Merkel, if I am allowed to return to Lewis's southern regions, is rather like that stomach gas in one of Anthony Burgess's novels – just wandering around in no particular direction.
This is the big day of the week for my family. After two years of labour, my wife is releasing her new book on Swedish identity, modernity and emigration. On our way home from the launch, I start to think about how much Sweden has changed in the past decades. It is a different country than the one I grew up in. It is, for the most part, a much better country. Yet one still has to fight boredom in Sweden, especially on encounters with its political or public culture. Burgess once said of Swedish girls that they were known for blondness and blandness. I know Burgess had subterranean reasons to look away from other half, but if he had befriended the male part too he would have found blandness to be a unisexual trait.
I often think of my motherland as a bigger version of Düsseldorf. It is clean, competitive, tax-compliant and engineerial. It heralds its mini-me version of Ordnungspolitik. It is still a post-religious, industrial society. The only thing that hits a godly nerve is the cameral belief in fiscal discipline, now protected by an ear ringed and ponytailed finance minister - whose communiqués of austerity are taken as papal encyclical letters. Mind you, I like politicians keeping public expenditures on a tight leash. I also think Sweden deserves praise for its fiscal turnaround, from deficit junkie to knight of fiscal balance. The problem with Sweden is rather that it creates religions out of worldly phenomena. Now these spiritual alchemists are worshipping fiscal discipline. And it is a religion that makes the country feel jolly good about itself now that the rest of Europe is throwing itself to the dogs.
This is where the new austere, bourgeois Sweden subtly mixes with its socialist, profligate, Olof-Palmeusque past. It finds its meaning in the company of misery and crooks. It lights up in moral darkness. Palme thought he was the saviour of third-world crooks. The new Swedish Salvationists are on a mission to fiscally civilize everything south of Bavaria, east of Warsaw, and west of Oslo. Bright as a North Star, The Economist recently said of Sweden's economy. Well, Caesar, in Shakespeare's version, thought he was "constant as a Northern star" just before that fatal encounter with senate rebellions. Still, Sweden is one of the better countries this side of the galaxy.
I am up early to catch a flight to Vienna for a weekend of work and pleasure. But once I step off the flight, I realize that my true mission for the weekend is to throw myself into the spirit of European decline. Surely, that is what Vienna is for? And I find that life on that side of the fence can be jolly pleasant – especially, if it is served with kapuziner and apfelstrudel. I am being unfair to Austria. It is a country that puzzles and fascinates me. I feel an emotional obligation to like the country, do not ask me why, but I often do not understand its people.
And yet what is it I do need to understand, I ask myself as I take the floor to give a talk about Europe's strategic economic choices in the new Asian century. Here is a country with solid economic growth. Its banks are stable and Austria is not going to be the trigger of an escalating bank crisis in Europe, which it was in 1931 when Kreditanstalt collapsed. It is, for all I know, an economy that embraces globalisation and believes you can raise your affluence also at an age of European declinism, which is a rare sentiment these days. And the current government, free from that odious pink lederhosen Rambo, Jörg Haider, seems culturally avert to letting the printing press do the job that politicians cannot muster.
Perhaps history is repeating itself. Fürst von Metternich, the 19th century statesman, was an Austrian politician - but he was born in the Rhineland and could never understand the mindset of the Habsburgs. He thought that the empire did not belong in Europe. "Asia", he said, "begins at Landstrasse", the eastward road out of Vienna. That road still points toward Budapest. The distance to Asia remains the same. But mentally Vienna has moved closer to the east.
We begin the weekend with a splendid tour of Vienna's traditional coffee houses. Our tutor, an Austrian actor, takes us around the coffee houses in central Vienna. We went for a mélange at Griensteidl and then he guides us through the history of Central, Herrenhof, Hawelka, and Bräunerhof. We are read passages from some of their Stammgasts: Alfred Polgar, Otto Friedländer, Hans Weigel, Peter Altenberg, Thomas Bernhard, and Friedrich Torberg. We learn amusing anecdotes about more famous coffee house luminaries: Freud, Mahler, Krauss, Wittgenstein, and Trotsky. And this lovely visit in the world of yesterday ends with a conversation about Viennese economists of the mid-war Austrian school: Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek.
A grand empire had collapsed, an economy was in ruin. These economists had ringside seats to the Austrian decline. Hayek founded the Konjunkturforschungsinstitut, the institute for business-cycle research, and Mises headed the Vienna Chamber of Commerce. Schumpeter, the former finance minister - bald, no earring - and financial crook who, according to his biographer rode Vienna's main boulevard with a "blond prostitute on one knee and a brunette on the other", had already started to practice his own economic doctrines. "Creative destruction" was also the motto for his financial and romantic life. In the end, they all had to leave Vienna. Looking out from his office on the busy and grand Ringstrasse, Mises told economist Fritz Machlup that all this now had to go. "Maybe grass will grow here", he said, "because our civilization will end".
I have always disliked Sundays. It is a day that cannot decide what it is: the start or the end of a week? But this Sunday, there is much to enjoy. We start it with breakfast at Café Central and end it, at least our Viennese sojourn, with a late lunch at Café Central. In between, the only thing that moves is our discussion - from the eurozone crisis to Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos, from the Chauteau Briand at Hotel Sacher - which we feasted on after a remarkably good Straussian evening at the Staatsoper yesterday evening - to sexual habits of old German composers. I return home in the evening. My youngest son is teething. No one yet understands what the trees in Brussels are whispering. I bless autumn for its early arrival. We have a few more months then until the grass starts to grow again.
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