There was a mouse in one of the traps this morning. He’d been zapped straight through the head, so death would’ve been instantaneous. But I tell you what, my God he was fat. He was Cyril Smithmouse. This concerns me, because as it’s crop-fee and freezing cold outside now, he must be getting his three squares in here somehow: and I’m not the chef…or at least, neither knowingly nor willingly. Perhaps he was a terrifying new strain of carnivorous mickey – or even Mickey Cannibalmouse – soon to become the Next Big Thing. He was already Big, and thus well on the way.

Although it’s cold first thing, we are having the most amazing spell of clear-skied weather at the moment. According to the Meteo down here in Department Numero 47, we’re due for quite a few more days of it yet, which (I have to confess) is sort of how I always remember the French South West at this time of year from when I was a lot younger.

This is – unbelievably – the first time since buying the house here fifteen years ago that I’ve been around to give the grass its pre-Winter haircut. Having spent the later Summer months in Greece and Italy, I got back too late to catch the growing spurt that often occurs in the wet November weather. Now the tractor mower I have (The Green Beast) has to have its mulching cover taken off, and cutting blade pulled all the way up, so it can swipe the top three inches off and then chuck the slain grass out freely in all directions. One waits a day or two to let the cut grass dry a little, and then ploughs in at blade level 4 make the whole look more like a lawn and less like an undulating unripe haystack.

Over the winter, this will all gradually tamp down and meld with the shoots that are left. By April and two cuts in, you’d never know the previous untidiness had ever existed. A lawnmower destroys all memories ruthlessly.

However, not all nostalgia consists of False Memory Syndrome. Indeed, there is something about late Autumn that creates a form of nostalgia in the present. The very falling leaves, reds and browns where there were once greens and yellows suggest a recherche of what once was alive – but is now fading away to become the annually repeated remembrance ceremony for a lost summer.

Perhaps this is the soppy side of me, but the diluted blue of an autumn late afternoon sky in southern France gives me the same feeling as the hum coming up from a lawn at about 8 pm after an English day in the middle of what the old-fashioned British newspapers used to call a heatwave. It’s a kind of echo: the high summer Aquitaine sky yells “Bloooo!”, and the December bounce reflects it.

But the best thing of all about the clear pre-Christmas Lot dusk is that light-orange-going-pink action replay of sunset you get at about 5 pm in the north-to-south western 180 degrees of the Sky. You see the Time trinity in full display: the hotter colours of the sun’s past below the darker-blue present….and with a simple about turn, the navy-to-charcoal in the East foretelling a cold tar night of the future.

Last Saturday night, I stayed over with friends up the road from here. In the rather posh bedroom with which I’d been generously supplied, there was a Velux window in the old raised roof. This gave me a prime ringside seat at around 1 am for without doubt the best rendition I’ve ever seen of the Giant Plough star arrangement.

The only honest and simple word for this kind of weather is pure. It affords one a complete communion with colour, light, then, now, next, far, near…but above all, real.

It’s the ‘real’ that bureaucrats, bankers and billionaires rarely see and never appreciate. And its dearth for them nurtures the bonkers denialism we see, read and hear in the media every day. It is an inexplicable, natural display that explains almost everything that is wrong in the West’s 21st century.

Earlier at The Slog: baffling, blustering, bonkers, bewildering Brussels