Autumn – the one season you can rely on to get it right
Yesterday marked the first day of meteorological autumn and, true enough, as I watched from my window a squall of yellow leaves drifted by.
The mornings are cold enough to fog up the bedroom window and birds are livening up in advance of the autumn migration.
I watch – and listen – keenly. For we are fast approaching my favourite time of year.
“Autumn is a second spring,” the French Philosopher Albert Camus once wrote. “Where every leaf is a flower.”
Some of you may argue that this summer has in fact been one rather long, wet, prelude to autumn and you would not be wrong.
Certainly this summer has been wetter than average. Each of the three months has exceeded its long-term average rainfall total in many areas: June was wettest in the North and July wettest in the South.
While not enough to shatter any records, the UK received 320mm of rainfall between June 1 and Aug 30 – 32.8 per cent more than the 241mm average.
This means, and drum roll please, the great summer of 2017 will go down as the UK’S 11th wettest on record. In Scotland, it has been the fifth wettest summer on record.
Still, rather than clinging on to the nostalgia of long hazy summers in decades past, I am increasingly of the view that in this era of anthropogenic climate change we should simply give up on it as a season altogether.
To cut it adrift as a single entity and treat it more as a slightly warmer extension to spring which in itself is becoming a slightly warmer extension to winter.
In a few decades, perhaps, autumn is all we will have left as the last of our distinct seasons. Regardless of what the weather throws our way the leaves will still crisp up and drop to the ground and the air fill with mouldering scents. Here rests depths of memory and the joy of a world still turning.