I did not write this (indeed, I am not capable of writing anything as good as this) but I just read this article and it feels like the author looked into my soul. Some thoughts on the seasons and the passing of time by the ever-excellent Ian Dunt.
It’s dark as I write this. Dark and cold and wet and miserable: the great and final statement of the British Isles in autumn. Every season lies, except for winter. Winter is the most honest season. Winter never promises you shit. No-one claims to love it. Nothing delightful ever happens in it. No good will ever come of it.
Winter begins the precise moment there is nothing left to look forward to. It ends whenever you first feel a faint glimmer of warmth on your face from the sun – probably sometime in May, perhaps April if you’re lucky.
In winter, everything is dead. It is nighttime when you go to work and nighttime when you leave, always nighttime really because in the day there is often no weather to speak of, just the ceaseless grey. There is no texture to winter. Winter is a tomb. You just grind your way through it, December through to March, around 120 days of marrow-cold misery, and hope to come out the other side.
Autumn, on the other hand, has become fashionable recently. People claim to look at what I’m seeing now – the drippy chilly sadness of it all – and like it. They really insist that this is fun for them. They never used to say this, but now I hear it all the time. Autumn is everyone’s favourite season apparently.
I am sure that for many people this is true, although an alarming number seem to think that this opinion acts as a substitute for having a personality. There’s something a bit Camus about it, a bit Elliot. Not for you the simple pleasures of a beach and an ice cream. Not for you a summer blockbuster. You are complex and undiscovered. You walk through a city park with a warm coat and a coffee, thinking deep thoughts about architecture, then go to see an Oscar contender.
But here’s the thing: autumn lies. When you visualise it, it’s When Harry Met Sally. Crisp weather, the streets brushed with red from fallen leaves, the trace of cinnamon in the air, as the Christmas decorations start to go up. In reality, it is cold and wet and dark. It’s shit. The leaves mingle with rainwater on the roof of the bus stop and drop on you as you wait, tracing a meanspirited line from your collar underneath the back of your shirt. There’s dogshit on your shoes. A bracing wind hits your face for the first time in months and tells you: ‘Much more of this to come, mate. Won’t be over quickly.’ The things you could do just a few weeks ago – stop on a bench and soak up the world around you, sit outside and have dinner with your partner, roll up your jacket and use it as a pillow as you lie on your back in the park, listening to the birds – they are all impossible now. Cunted once more, for another half year.
Summer lies too, but on a much vaster scale. It lies to the same extent that winter tells the truth. Its lie, which is shared by a great many people, myself included, is that one perfect summer is possible. A summer which lasts forever, where you’ve never looked better and all your romantic aspirations are satisfied, where you sit with your friends in the park, and your laughters drifts in the breeze and somehow that afternoon, when all is right in the world, and the people you love are all together, lasts for days on end. It is Endless Summer. It is the Long Hot Summer.
Summer is a lie. I never had my Endless Summer, my Long Hot Summer. If these things exist, it is as a composite, in retrospect, of the various summer afternoons you stitched together through life. And that’s if you’re lucky.
As I get older, and possibilities begin to close more often than they open, I find summer increasingly sad. This is what life is like in middle age – poised between that which still might be, and that which will not. Incidentally there is no cure for it. It is not about roads not taken. It is about the fact that there are necessarily fewer roads available to you, no matter which you have walked down.
You can still love summer, even when you know she’s lying to you, but it is a more melancholic love than the one you had when you were young, and more easily fooled.
In spring, we get a little bit of everything – occasional bursts of warm weather when life becomes socialised and doses of cool weather where we retreat back indoors. Spring bursts with opportunity but it does not contain it in itself. You rarely imagine your perfect day taking place in spring. It’s still a little too windy, a little too likely to rain, a little too unsettled. A warm sunny day in spring feels like you’re getting something for free, like you found a fiver on the street.
Anyway, a fat lot of good it did me to write that, in late October, when my skin is the colour of cellophane on raw chicken, with months of bad weather heading our way. God knows why I did it. Although I suppose there’s this: summer feels terribly distant. Spring not so much. We’ll feel the sun on our face again soon enough.