South West France has a New England feel to it at the moment: yellow, rust, orange, beige, and forty shades of fading green. Every tree defoliates at a different pace and in its own time: my fruiters have been almost bare for a fortnight now, but the main walnut is still holding on to its leaves…even if they are brown at the edges and crisp once underfoot.

As with the hazelnuts, it’s been a bumper year for walnuts. At some point next week, I’ll ring my neighbours and start exchanging walnuts for pumpkin. Then the two can be combined to make a blue-cheese soup. The walnuts and pumpkins, not my neighbours.

I should mention that I have (literally) hundreds of very large quinces, and as the years pass I’m getting adept at unloading them onto mainlining quince-jelly addicts….the only deal being I want a jar of the output please. This year, my dentist’s receptionist has been added to the list. Before I’ve finished, it’s entirely possible I’ll be supplying the Elysées Palace. The backlog of unused quince jelly is, however, barely manageable as it is.

There are many things one can do with gelée de coing: serve it as an accompaniment to sheep cheese, add it to honey wine and other fruits for a dessert, grill it with chorizo, glaze quails with it during cooking, or spoon it over granola and yogurt. The major problem for me is that I am not a big sheep cheese, dessert, chorizo, quail or breakfast cereal sort of bloke. I mainly eat quince jelly with leftover cold cuts like pork and venison. But neither of these are found in profusion here in the land of duck confit, prunes, and noisettes. So the pots of jelly just keep on piling up.

If you’re a cricket fan, then you can use quinces as the ball for at least a hundred overs: they are harder than oak, and really will stay the course. The unpredictable bounce is not conducive to accurate off-spin bowling, but then I’ve never been a cricket purist.

Otherwise, pretty much everything else on my little plot here is functional. I can make apple crumble, tarte aux poires, and prune sauce for duck throughout the winter. I can have five types of jam on toast for additional vitamin C hits. And I can add crunch to every which way kind of crumble with the hazelnuts….as well as celebrating a traditional Christmas with both them and the remaining walnuts.

Next year, the main learning curve is going to be making wine and spirits from excess fruit, and canning stuff. As you might expect, all the equipment for this is a fraction of the expected price if one imports it from Poland. As I write, a lorry is heading this way from Cracow. It’s contents include 25 metres of balustrade, a fruit crusher, distillation equipment, and ten cases of Perla beer.

But allow me to close tonight with a nice anecdote. In the pool here I’ve installed a robot cleaner of great efficiency and almost no noise. The only sound it makes, in fact, is a hubble-bubble-ockle-cockle at very low volume when it meets the pool walls. There is a species of bird native to these parts: I’ve no idea what they are, but I can tell you they’re small, grey and yellow mixed in plumage, and with tiny beaks. The main thing is, I’m beginning to realise their mating call is uncannily close to hubble-bubble-ockle-cockle.

So it is that, of an Autumn afternoon, there is a constant conversation between my pool robot and a sex-mad bird. I have absolutely no idea what sex the bird is, but he/she is beyond besotted with the robot. We are talking Juliet on the balcony and Romeo below giving it very heavy Wherefore art thou. I went up to the poolside around 4 pm today in search of a siesta, and found instead a love affair between a plastic wet vacuum cleaner and a flying dinosaur.

Verily, this is a record.

Earlier at The Slog: The oily petrodollar rag that is US foreign policy