Time to indulge our human need to hunker down

Are we nearly there yet? I think we are, dear readers. The clocks are going back this weekend, and with it the perfect excuse to retreat indoors and wallow in autumnal melancholia.

Me, I’ve ordered a new slow cooker and an even slower pace of life. I always find the transition from summer quite mournful; no more spontaneous picnics, no more late evenings in the garden, no more sunshine coursing through our veins.

But now autumn is well and truly here I have swapped resignation for contentment and am ready to embrace the season.

Things I would have found tediously tectonic and time-wastey in August or September – long baths, lazy mornings, hugging the radiator while flicking through a copy of BBC Good Food magazine’s Beetroot Special – are now stirring my blood.

Now that we’re safely past the whole fetishisation of Danish hygge (more cushions) and Swedish lagom (sufficient candles) we can revert to our great British traditions of muddy walks with filthy spaniels and children hurling themselves into leaf drifts tall as a towering plate of freshly baked drop scones.

Once back indoors, we have a collective need to hunker down, hibernate, nest.

Autumn is for human being, not human doing.

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away; Lengthen night and shorten day; Every leaf speaks bliss to me Fluttering from the autumn tree. I shall smile when wreaths of snow Blossom where the rose should grow; I shall sing when night’s decay Ushers in a drearier day.

So wrote Emily Brontë in the 19th century. Not a lot has changed since then.

There is a deep, atavistic pleasure to be had from hot drinks on chilly nights, card games and silence, save the incessant patter of rain.