Goodbye Summer!

Summer's gone, day's spent with the grass and sun I don't mind; to pretend I do seems really dumb.

Although this paean (above) to the advent of autumn is hardly on a par with Keats’ ‘Ode to Autumn’- one of my favourite poems ever -I think these opening lines of the Boo Radley’s Brit Pop hit really do resonate. As a middle-aged adult, I spend much of my summer – apart from this one – in Spain, and revel in the Mediterranean sunshine, but I was born and brought up in a part of the English North West, where the euphemisticallynamed ‘liquid sunshine’ ie rain was ever in evidence.

My Mancunian mother’s favourite saying was ‘It came and it went’ and, seemingly, this is how summer sun seemed to me during many days of the long, predominantly grey and rainy summertime of childhood. Therefore, it was never a season to which I particularly looked forward. Autumn, however, as a child, was exciting and distinct; the nip in the air presaged my October birthday and the smells and sounds of Halloween and Bonfire Night. As a so called ‘grown up’, I can still take or leave a British summer, but pre half-term October to me is splendid: you can still have the daylight in the morning on the way to work, the air is generally crisp and invigorating, and I can start to put on the central heating in the evening without feeling guilty.

I know that this year, with the Coronavirus ever-present amongst us, there will be no Hallowe’en parties, Trick or Treating or even Bonfire Night in the way we might have done in former years. However within the comforts of our own homes, and within whatever the current guidelines say about how many people we can have in our households, we can still have fun indoors, whilst appreciating the gloriousness of the motley colours of autumn outdoors.

As an honorary North-Easterner, I feel blessed that I am living in one of the most picturesque areas of the country and that the season of ‘mellow fruitfulness’ is being spent here.