Lessons from a "well seasoned" Saint

Autumn Landscape with Four Trees (1885) by Vincent van Gogh

Message for the Parish Magazine of St Giles-in-the-Fields, September 2023:

On the day the church remembers St Giles, the patron saint of leprosy sufferers, summer turns to autumn in the UK meteorological calendar. Seasonal change was a pet topic of the pioneering ecologist, ornithologist and priest Gilbert White. While many of his conclusions have since been disproved by modern science - such as his belief that swallows hibernate underground (rather than migrate) in winter - his observations about leprosy appear to be borne out, in part.