I have always sought to find a way to mark the passage of life, ever since reading Twilight and facing my own lack of immortality, the format has changed over time. In the last few years it’s been Instagram reels, 90 seconds of little clips from my life, overlaid with a snazzy tune. I realised recently that if you don’t get enough likes or views on your reels, Instagram can downgrade the quality of these videos forever. The audacity. How dare they lower the quality of my videos of trees and coffees and the cat. I am being punished for my lack of international notoriety, hard to achieve when my account is private and I only get about ten views but still, I am done feeding the beast. One day, Instagram will have faded into obscurity and snazzypumpkins.co.uk will live on forever.

My original intention was to transfer all of the reels over to YouTube, and then link them on here for prosperity. But let’s face it, no one cares, so they will live forever in my google drive and that will be that. Instead I am going back to basic 2010 era Lottie, writing a blog and possibly editing a few of my better shots together into a YouTube video every now and then. In all likelihood the only people who are going to read this are my Mother and any of my friends who pay enough attention to my instagram to dig out the link. Hello if you made it here – thank you for reading my nonsense.

My first September in Manchester was about as rainy as I expected it to be and a bit of a come down from the heat and humidity of Florida. The trees near my house were still mostly very green and shiny from the aforementioned rain but as the month wore on they started to show the beginnings of orange and red, flirting with the idea of autumn as the sun came out for a little while. As I write this it is very wet and the tree outside my bedroom window is stubbornly green. My tree related skills have levelled up this September as I purchased a tree book ‘Collins Tree Guide – The most complete field guide to the trees of Britain and Europe’. How exciting, now I will not only exclaim ‘Look at that pretty tree’ I will also then be able to tell you exactly what tree it is based on the leaf shape and its growing pattern. Lucky you.

Tony and I had a few adventures in September including a trip to the cricket, sadly for Tony Kent lost and Lancs won, happily for Lancs fans Liam Livingstone sent several cricket balls into actual outer space. It was awesome. We visited a very cool cocktail bar / restaurant called Stow, 8.5/10 would absolutely go again, we loved it.

The sunlight evenings of September have quickly given way to the beginnings of October and I am very excited about it. Many pumpkins will come to decorate my house very soon, perhaps the great pumpkin will visit and shower me with gifts.