The autumn is the most beautiful time of the year
September is a time of new beginnings, from starting at school to making plans for the year ahead. Here we celebrate the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
OH happy day! September and at last we can celebrate approaching autumn, season of fruitful mellowness and regain our sanity. In my garden the salvia is a purple profusion, the dahlias a dark red delight, the roses keep on coming and there are apples ready to pick. The grass is green again, the crazy heat is abating and all will be well.
“April is the cruellest month,” wrote poet TS Eliot. Perhaps, but June, July and August are the stupidest, a dangerous time for hearts, head and loins. “Summer loving had me a blast. Summer loving happened so fast.” Yeah, yeah.
Sunshine unhinges us. It becomes an obsession. We seek it wherever it can be found. Even normally sensible people completely lose their minds. Who in the name of sanity would put themselves through the summer airport ordeal? In the name of sanity nobody would. In the name of insanity millions do.
Even so, this year we didn’t need to go to the sun. The sun came to us. It was too damn hot. Old people overheated and millions of the rest of us underdressed. Too many elderly men’s legs on show, too many unattractive male torsos, too many female midriffs.
Heat became a bore. It prompted endless tedious debate. Do you enjoy the heat? Do you hate it? Phew what a scorcher! Phew what a torture! Is it the hottest ever or do we remember a hotter one?
That’s the trouble with summer. It’s all about celsius and every extra degree robs us of more IQ. If it’s cold everyone complains, if it’s rainy everyone weeps, if it’s blazing hot everybody sweats. In the country hot, hot, hot may be OK but if you happen to live in a city – hot town, summer in the city/ Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty.
One of the beauties of autumn is that the weather doesn’t matter. It won’t be tropical, it won’t be arctic. It will be British. People ask: “Do you remember the blazing summer of ’76 or the brutal winter of ’62?” Nobody ever enquires: “Do you remember the autumn of ’83 or ’92?” Or any other year for that matter. Not for meteorological reasons anyway. You may need to take a sweater, possibly an umbrella, but so what? Wind wouldn’t be a disaster, rain wouldn’t be an outrage. It’s autumn, we’ll take it as it comes.
SOME see autumn as the end of something, a dying fall towards winter – that’s the standard line. “Summer’s lease has all too short a date,” said Shakespeare. So the sun starts to disappear, leaves turn brown and fall, the days get shorter, then the clocks go back. The foolish lament September as the saddening end of summer. They should rejoice and recognise it for what it really is: a new beginning.
More people are born in September than in any other month and the day that has more birthdays than any other of the year is the 26th – precisely nine months after Christmas Day, evidence of the popularity of the gift that keeps on giving (or the potency of once-ayear champagne).
Our calendar is upside down. Six days after Christmas comes New Year’s Day, probably the worstplanned fixture ever. It makes no sense. Officially it’s the start of everything. In fact it’s the start of nothing – not even the tax year.
Hard to think of a worse day to open a new chapter or fulfil a resolution. It’s cold and damp. You’re still suffering from post-Christmas come-down, still trying to get rid of rotten presents on eBay.
Is this really the best time to start a diet? Can midwinter really be a sensible moment to decide to give up drink? Hardly. It’s the trickiest time of the year. Is this when you should be making judgments about how life should go? When did any new year’s resolution ever last for more than a month? Why would it? Dry January isn’t a statement of intent, it’s punishment for the amount you drank in December and it’s usually followed by legless February. What did the Romans do for us? Among other things they stuck New Year’s day in January.
September is really the time when life begins afresh. Small children start at school or move up to the next school year. Millions of teenagers, freshly armed or lumbered with their exam results, embark on a new life at university college or work. Parents get back to normal after the rigours of schools out. We start to wear sensible clothes again. The silliness is over, the holiday money’s been spent – so take stock and think about what you’ve done well, what you’ve done badly and what you’ll do differently, make plans and decide how life is going to be lived for the next 12 months.
A week today is Jewish New Year (yes Jeremy Corbyn, even Jews who have spent their whole lives here celebrate it, admittedly without irony). They pray to be inscribed in the book of life for another year, starting in autumn. They repent the sins and peccadilloes of the past year but they do not make a list of silly resolutions. Resolutions don’t work. Resolutions, shmesolutions. Sukkot, the Jewish harvest festival, this year absolutely coincides with the Church of England harvest festival. Harvest is harvest – nothing ironic about that.
IT’S noticeable that autumn is the only season blessed with a decent adjective: autumnal. and the best the others can do is springlike, wintry and summery – no cadence, no style, no charm.
“Summer afternoon, summer afternoon,” said novelist Henry James, “to me those have always been the most beautiful words in the English language.”
Well, to each his own but James certainly wouldn’t have said that about “summery”.
But “autumnal”, full of atmosphere. It conjures misty mornings, golden leaves, the subtle interlude between the banality of summer and the frigidity of winter and with none of the hectic excitement of spring. It’s a time for mature contemplation. Perhaps I like autumn because I am in the autumn of my years (and that may be putting it kindly). Perhaps it requires a certain maturity.
Fully 10 years ago I was walking along a river bank with my friend Andrew, past some residential barges. “Hello,” said a man from his deck, “where are you going?”
“We’re just two middle-aged men out on a walk,” said Andrew.
“Middle-aged?” said the man, “you’ll be lucky.”
Whether you are in the autumn of your years you cannot really say until it’s over because autumn means you’re only three-quarters through. If it turns out you never reach winter then I suppose this was winter.
No other season has inspired a song to compare with Autumn Leaves (“I miss you most of all my darling when autumn leaves start to fall”) – try Nat King Cole, or the original French Les Feuilles Mortes (C’est une chanson qui nous resemble, Toi tu m’aimais, et je t’aimais)– try Yves Montand.
And those well into the autumn of life will surely remember the 1967 song by the brilliant 23-year-old Ray Davies (fresh from making Waterloo Sunset earlier that year): “Breeze blows leaves of a mustycoloured yellow/ So I sweep them in my sack,/ Yes, yes, yes, it’s my autumn almanac.”
And mine.