Deep autumn blues blown away by red-hot sax on Clapham Common

Life can seem like shit at this time of year in SW4, especially if you are broke and adrift and 61 years of age.

The beautiful sadness of autumn can be thrilling if you have the heart for it, deeply depressing if you haven't. Anyway that's the sort of crap I was pondering on a recent walk around the common, late afternoon, after the school's out crowds but before the commuter rush.

Heading towards the  boating lake, the yearning sounds of  someone practising jazz tenor saxophone resonate across the  plate-glass water. There's a bloke in blue sitting on a bench on the other side of the pond, and he seems to be blowing his heart out with these repeated phrases, which sometimes seem almost to rip the fabric of the air they travel through.

Gradually he builds it up, adding a few notes each time, until it's unmistakably from Coltrane's A Love Supreme.

Another man, perhaps his friend, joins him on the bench and just lies back to enjoy the music and his bottle of whatever. Solitary walkers and a few couples  are watching from other benches. I move closer, stop, listen, move on, walk back across towards the North Side, still hearing those fabulously melancholy yet paradoxically uplifting riffs.

If I hadn't already been a jazz fan this would have ignited my interest. Instead it re-0ignited this dormant  flame. Thanks, anonymous sax player. I wish I knew who you were.

The small pleasures of autumn

Today's brief autumn pleasure: being seven years old again on Clapham Common.

The walk back from the Venn Street sorting office, bright morning sunshine, clutching latest eBay mistake under arms, saluting the crows and applauding their intolerance of the plump pigeons trespassing on their rightful bounty of stale mother's pride.

Dodging the young mums with their large babies and tiny dogs, sidestepping the late-for-work brigade legging it to the tube, dodging the 88 bus driver's determined attempts to soak all pedestrians by aiming at the biggest puddles.

In this late september, low angle sunshine, gleaming treasures reveal themselves on the too-green, dew-drenched grass. They are big fat conkers, left to rot since  few boys can be bothered to collect them these days it seems. I am incapable of passing without aiming a kick at one. And then another. And them I am seven again, but really I am Jimmy Greaves. An even plumper conker manifests itself a yard ahead of my right toe. I swerve and chip the little ballock expertly, it flies, curving a fabulous arc over the park bench, and then slamming itself, with a satisfying "dank-e" into the gleaming black door panel of a range-topping Audi parked on the north-side.

I turn on my heel and walk away, head down, fast, in case anyone had noticed.