Season skips a beat to autumn | Wairarapa Opinion | Local Voices from Wairarapa, New Zealand

Something unusual caught my eye on my regular Henley Lake walk on Saturday.

One of the trees on the banks of the lake is completely and spectacularly red. Every single leaf has coloured a deep red hue.

Not being a tree expert, perhaps fellow Lake walkers can help identify the tree, and explain why it's entirely ablaze in autumn colour - in February.

The day before, a colleague had pointed out the cherry tree outside the Times-Age offices has also got hints of orange autumn colouring about it, a sight she said she'd never seen at this time of year before.

Now, I know I've done my fair share of complaining about the summer weather - or lack of it - but I'm not about to start again.

Summer and I have made our peace and moved on. It just didn't happen this year, and I've accepted it, and now I'm looking forward to crisp autumn mornings, the smell of fires in the evenings, and the changing palette of colours in the trees.

And as autumn settles in - my thanks for the power-saving tip received through our text-to-ed column: snuggling up under a blanket to watch TV. Good advice. More tips would be very welcome.

You'll notice a change in the placement of our classified advertising in today's paper.

We're shifting classifieds to make them easier to find, so from now on, they'll always be inside the weather and TV pages - just turn twice from the back of the paper.

We've also added an index to death notices on p2.

Sports pages have moved slightly too. To make it easier for sports fans to find our local and national sport stories inside the paper, we've also added a pointer column from the back page.