I don’t know about you – obviously – but these dismal grey mornings, with a hint of mizzle in the air, properly do my head in. And while I do love the autumn colours, as the leaves change colour, die and eventually fall to the ground, I could happily live without it. This process, I now know, is called abscission which is, and here I quote from the internet: “the process by which plant components such as flowers, fruits, and leaves naturally separate from the parent plant. Senescence is a state of biological aging in which cells cease to divide and enter a cell cycle arrest phase. As so, this is the critical distinction between abscission and senescence.” Abscission is “a survival strategy, as trees conserve water, save energy, and reduce strain from winter storms by dropping their leaves to enter.” It’s all rather lovely, intelligent trees and all that, but despite the wonders of nature, I wish it could be either spring or summer every day.
I have never been diagnosed for Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) because if I do have it, it’s probably at the low end of the scale. I can cope with the increasing misery of the darker, colder days by focusing on the prospect of lighter warmer days which tend to occur from March and when the clocks change to British Summer Time (BST). Post summer, I feel the increasing gloom, for sure, but it’s not crushing, like my actual clinical depression.
I think it all comes from childhood and living in a house where the only heat came courtesy of a coal fire and a single electric heater we would transfer from room to room if we were daft enough to leave the living room. I had a winter long fear the water pipes would freeze – they did in 1963 and again in 1982: hardly a regular occurrence – but once you have it in your head that the pipes will burst and it’s actually happened you, or maybe just me, you never forget.
Then there was the ice forming on the inside of the windows, including, after bedtime, the one with the coal fire, then one’s fears are notched up again. With added darkness, a version of which lasts all day on most winter days and you find yourself wishing away the best part of a quarter, maybe even half, of your life in order to see the light again.
Unless our central heating conks out, there is little chance of burst pipes or frosty windows, but that doesn’t stop me thinking we will soon get The Worst Winter On Record, even if that shocker in 1982 was nearly 44 years ago. Those memories run deep.
Out and about today, I know I am stretching things a bit by wearing shorts, something I do until that inevitable day when I go out finding that it actually is very cold now and I look an absolute idiot and that I really need a sturdy pair of jeans, a woolly jumper, a thick coat and that expensive flat cap I bought on a whim in the summer. “Hopefully, I won’t need it,” I thought. Today, it’s a matter of time.
You’d think I’d be used to it by now, the dreary inevitability of autumn and, even worse, winter but it still takes me by surprise. And despite the fact that days are becoming incredibly short now, they seem to drag on forever.
Technically, we are barely halfway through autumn and the worst is yet to come. Halloween, Christmas (yes, fucking Christmas), the shortest day, the faux and utterly shit German market in Bristol, The Fucking Fairytale of New York and … no, no … let’s just leave it there. It’s making me even more depressed.
Sometimes things get worse before they get better. That’s certainly true of the seasons. Autumn is grim, winter is the pits, spring is the rebirth, regrowth, new life. Please, someone; just take the darkness away. I know I will have to wait until March. Sometimes I wish I was a tortoise. Put me in a box and wake me up when the clocks change. I’d happily hide beneath the winter quilt for the next four and a half months if I could.
