Damien Enright: The sun of October/Summery/On the hill's shoulder

Poet Dylan Thomas wrote eloquently about the month of his birth.

A holly laden with berries, and "brimming with..... blackbirds", as Dylan Thomas's 'Poem In October' says. But will the berries still be there at Christmas? Ah, there's the rub.

Blackbirds have eaten all the red berries on our cotoneaster — food for any birds that take a fancy.

I was going to write about isolation vis-a-vis the Sentinel Islands in the Indian Ocean, a location as isolated as any on earth, for various, other than purely geographical, reasons. I think I'll leave it for another day.