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“All the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey...” Possibly the most evocative opening lines to any song, anywhere, anytime, ever. And looking out of the window today, it’s an utterly perfect summation of what the world is looking like as Autumn starts to fade messily into the beginning of winter. This is always a strangely melancholy period for me – because I love Autumn, and I don’t want to let it go. In September and early October, there’s something tangible in the air, something full of hope and wonder. But as it gets colder and greyer and November makes it appearance, it starts to fade, and Autumn loses its special charm for another year. What’s so great about Autumn? I don’t mind Winter, even at it’s coldest; Summer, particularly the golden tail end of it in late August, is a beautiful time of year, and Spring has its own fresh appeal. Let’s be fair, life can be happy and sad, eventful and dull, great and terrible irrespective of what’s happening in the weather. But Autumn has always been ‘my’ season, and I’ve been in love with it for too many years to count. From the moment it creeps in behind summer’s back, surreptitiously, trying not to be noticed, until the day people finally stop pretending it’s an elongated Indian Summer and embrace it - which is usually just as it disappears – I feel like it’s the beginning of something. Whenever September rolls around, I feel like it’s the start of a new year – my internal clock has always been sub-consciously attuned the academic year, rather than the calendar year – and that there are possibilities in the world, excitement and adventure to come. Occasionally, it does. And every time I look back through the years to my better days long gone, either in warm nostalgia or groping for something to hold onto as the present day gets a bit shaky and infirm, it’s always moments in Autumn I come back to, that I hold onto. Maybe it’s the wind getting up again, maybe it’s “all the leaves and the colours” (to quote the once-upon-a-time Mrs. Tom Baker), maybe it’s the “new term, new people, new faces” mentality. Maybe it’s that all my great teenage adventures seemed to occur pre-Christmas, even if this is probably an accident of memory, rather than the stone cold truth. But every year except 1995 (a year that deserves a whole book dedicated to it, never mind a website column, such was its uniqueness) hasn’t started in January, but in September. I love that wave of optimism and that sense of magic that I get when the nights start to draw in, and the leaves become a cushion underfoot everywhere. Hopefully, some of that magic lingers on through the greyness and sense of unhappiness that the latter part of November brings with it, as Autumn is slowly dragged out into the shed, and locked up for another twelve months.
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11th November 2003 |
