Sometimes autumn is so bright, so fantastic, that it verges on surreality. A bingo card of cliche. Hurtling down the M3 yesterday I won them all: low mist diffusing dawn light, crystalline skies, trees like jumpers in hits chartreuse and vermillion. The leaves haven’t fully dropped yet, we are at that sweet spot, with the trees still clotheshorsing for it all. Even the side of the motorway looked like a postcard.
On the radio, the weather lady was jolly as she explained the country received enough rainfall last Saturday to fill Loch Ness. I couldn’t understand why she was presenting it as a meteorological achievement, trilling about the wettest day since records began in the late Victorian era. I thought about my sodden garden, the rain records at Beth Chatto’s garden that showed how barely any fell in May this year, about how long we are going to brush off climate catastrophe with a shrug, a jingoistic peep of “funny weather, eh!”.
Still, we were set for a “brighter” end to October, she said, as the colours flashed by and a buzzard passed overhead. I was heading to Somerset, the bit nestled beneath the Mendips. Land of single-track B-roads cloaked in hedgerow and leaf-tunnel. Land of houses that have names like “POSTMASTER’S COTTAGE” and wisteria. Chocolate boxes set in limestone. Here to pull into a relative stranger’s drive and talk to them about their garden, and a few other tangentially related things.
Walking to the pub for dinner, last sitting of the night, and I am 14 again and heading out to a babysitting gig. Twenty minutes with no street lights, just the stars pockmarking the sky and Venus showing off. Gently, the air chills my face and I catch that whiff of country pub - chip fat, open fire, centuries of quiet pints - before I see it.
The autumn here is the stuff of my childhood. Woodsmoke and low sun floating around making everything undeniably, almost ridiculously, beautiful. Too much beauty to capture properly; look at it straight-on and it glints too hard. Its magic lies in its evanescence: tomorrow we will be one day closer to winter.
It pains me to admit it, because I’ve always maintained that I can season-spot in the city, but autumn feels better out here. In London you have to seek out the smell of wet earth and rotting leaf, the squelch underfoot, the forgotten-about windfalls. Too much moves and so quickly that the necessary stasis in which the season thrives can’t happen.
But it’s this year, too. Last weekend we drove home through Chelsea, and I moaned as I saw a gingko burning fiercely against a smart Georgian terrace. I used to observe these things on my lunch breaks daily, and yet I’d managed to forget they’d existed.
London’s autumn lives in a city that, for now, doesn’t exist in the same way. Getting a bit nippy during after work pints on the pavement outside a pub; finding leaves among the fag packets underfoot; branches scattering themselves over telephone boxes in the smart bits of town. Autumn in London is band names glowing above gig venues, pink skies on the way to work, putting your coat on and finding receipts from last winter’s night out in the pocket. It’s the colour of dahlias in proud plots on council estates, it’s the sway of going-over Japanese anemones and wild aster turning everything lilac. It’s moaning about Regent’s Street’s lights going up too early. It’s heading up to Hampstead for the day, and pretending you took the Tube to the countryside.
These are small luxuries to miss in the midst of a pandemic, I know. But seasons in cities are made of different things. Our nature here is different, and sometimes more difficult to spot. This autumn, I suspect, we will be hunting for it more keenly - lest it pass us by entirely.
