Have you noticed the change yet, as you step outside?
That difference in the air, telling us autumn is moving in. Suddenly – for, even though we know it’s coming, it still always seems sudden – outside smells sharper, more fresh, more Scottish, somehow, and you understand that the seasons are shifting as ever they have; towards their winter rest.
Change is good.
I feel a rush of happiness that, soon, I won’t have to trudge down the garden to try to find a slug-free lettuce for yet another lunchtime salad. They were great in June, but there really is only so much you can do to perk up a lettuce leaf.
The spring onions which we haven’t managed to get through can stay where they are, to bolt and flower or turn to slime and disintegrate. I don’t care anymore, because there are leeks and carrots and umbrellas of winter kale lying in wait, for soup and mince and pies and stews with gravy.
Change is comforting.
Soon the leaves will turn to bronze and gold, and forests will crackle, frost-tipped, underfoot, as we hike through them on sparkling mornings. Our breath will billow before us, up into the naked canopies of the once-enveloping trees. We all know that those same trees will bud again before too long and, meanwhile, there’s Christmas for us all to look forward to.
Goodbye summer
Change is welcome.
My bikini body can go back under wraps until next year. Not that it got a chance to out itself much this summer – I felt the innocent families and creatures populating the lochs and beaches which we infrequented would not have enjoyed the peely-wally glare of my blue, Highland flesh, laid bare in the wild.
Sure, summer’s great and all, but at this time of year it can be a relief to admit that flip-flops hurt, barbecues are a faff, shorts are ugly, and crispy skin belongs on roast chicken, not on the arms and noses and necklines of middle-aged wifies like me.
Any day now, I am likely to invest in a nice, new, navy jumper. It’ll be similar to last year’s, but it will, nonetheless, be another welcome herald of change.
Change is reassuring.
TV is about to get infinitely better as the autumn schedules begin to kick in. Once again, we’ll be closing the curtains to keep the chill out and snuggling up to Quizzy Mondays on BBC Two, Strictly, Bake Off, the Sewing Bee, whatever familiar format lights your candle of an evening.
I don’t even mind bidding a seasonal adieu to my plan B husband, Monty Don, on Gardeners’ World because, let’s be honest – his garden is a bit weird, isn’t it? So, off he’ll go, for later.
Change reinforces what always was
Change is always the same.
The Queen has died and we have a new King. As the seasons change, so too the monarchy and, yet, what has changed has only reinforced what was ever thus.
I wonder which traditions will change, or fall by the wayside, in the reign of King Charles and whether, indeed, there’s room for any new ones
I saw the Queen once, from a distance, when I was a teenager, attending the Royal Garden Party at Holyrood with my parents and sister. Back in those days, daughters of marriageable age were allowed to go, too, as crumpet. My poor brother had to wait for us in the car park.
I wore white gloves and a white hat, like a traffic warden. Perhaps not the most poignant anecdote you’ll read this week, but it’s all I’ve got – what’s yours? Is it better? It’s bound to be.
I wonder which traditions will change, or fall by the wayside, in the reign of King Charles and whether, indeed, there’s room for any new ones – can there be such a thing as a new tradition?
Our feelings and responses are private and valid
I can’t think. Everything’s gone a bit Twilight Zone here recently, not only because of the death of the Queen but, also, I caught Covid last week, two days before I was due to leave for a solo trip to New York. No big deal, just the foiling of a lifelong ambition, and an acutely first world problem.
Nonetheless, it was a bit of a blow, even though it’s a comfort not to have been that fabled Patient Zero who infected an entire jumbo jet with coronavirus by her very existence.
The delirium and spooky dreams of Covid and its aftermath have made a strange time all the stranger and, perhaps it’s brain fog, but I believe that change is, fundamentally, and despite the universality of the seasons, solitary.
Wherever we are and whoever surrounds us throughout this and other times of change, we experience all of it on our own. Our feelings and responses are ours, they’re private and they are valid, just as they are.
Nobody apart from the King knows how the King feels right now apart, perhaps, from the bees. Same goes for all of us, and there’s something uniquely comforting about that.
Erica Munro is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter and freelance editor
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