Why exhilarating autumn outshines summer

Since this is the first day of the new university year, let us begin with a test. Compare and contrast these two passages. First: “Les sanglots longs / Des violons / De l’automne / Blessent mon coeur / D’une longueur / Monotone.” Second: “‘Hurrah! blister my kidneys!’ exclaimed he in delight, ‘it is a frost! – the dahlias are dead!’ “

As you have instantly recognised, the first is Verlaine, moaning Frenchly about the melancholy of autumn. The second is Mr Jorrocks, R S Surtees’s hunting grocer, embracing the same season with Anglo-saxon relish.

We Brits are not necessarily very good at summer. We long for light and warmth, for strawberries and cream and dewy bottles of cold Sancerre consumed among the murmuring of innumerable bees. But the reality is often less delicious. A vicious east wind raises gooseflesh on pale skin exposed by intrepid excursions into gingham and broderie anglaise. There are wasps. The chicken scorched from the barbecue has an oysterish tinge near the bone: the spectre of salmonella looms. A sudden squall extinguishes the tealights.

Arriving back in Blighty last week from the land where the lemon trees grow, I found the wheat cut and the stubble full of pigeons – and felt not regret, but exhilaration. Winter is coming, but even if you don’t share Jorrocks’s passion for field sports, it is hard to resist the allure of an autumn morning when you wake to find the garden slung with glittering cobwebs.

Then there is the food – not just partridge and pheasant, but the stuff that costs nothing at all. Walking the headlands I found sloes and damsons, late blackberries, crab-apples, and a walnut tree heavy with fruit. From the crab-apples I will make crab-apple and chilli jelly, to use up a glut of homegrown chillis; and Patience Gray gives a recipe for green walnut preserve in her cookbook Honey from a Weed. It is time-consuming (though not complicated) and paring the walnuts gives you the authentically stained hands of the Apollonian kapheneion owner from whom Gray had the receipt. But Gray says it is “well worth the trouble it takes”. We’ll see.

Abandoning with relief the crumpled linens of summer, I see Vogue has announced that corduroy is A Thing. I can hardly wait to disinter from my wardrobe the khaki cord Land Girls’ breeches that I bought decades ago at an army surplus store. Laced to the knee and ample around the hips, they were made in 1942 and seem indestructible. I haven’t worn them for a while, wary of being mistaken for a less floridly moustachioed Vita Sackville-west, but 75 years on, they are overdue a renaissance.

The university freshmen about to plunge into the rigours of induction week are far more worldly than I was at their age. But their laptops and devices have robbed them of the keenest of all September’s seductions: new stationery. As a teenager, I read with a thrill of recognition Colette’s description of her passion for the elegant hardware of writing: “Pens ... ruled laid paper, scented glue ... unnecessary coloured pencils, childish implements of a rather finicking worker”. For me, more even than the taste of blackberries or the ridged pelt of corduroy, it is the sharp cedar scent of a new pencil and the creamy blankness of a pristine notebook that distill the essence of the turning season.