Mellow fruitlessness: why we all need to embrace the dark side of Autumn

It is hard to know what to say about autumn; it’s hard to know what could be new to tell you. You know it all already: leaves turning, a faint smell of smoke on the air, four o’clock golden light falling softly like an Instagram filter through leaded windows onto rumpled knitwear and dappled velvet. Apples. Pumpkins. Heirloom everything. Perfect drops of rain leaving diamond dashes down the glass. Firelight. Candlelight. Le Creuset. Wellies, waxed jackets, wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings. Tweed. Cashmere. Flasks.

Or, as the writer Natasha Hodgson put it, “all Book Women mouthing off about Big Jumpers and oooh cosy autumn cosy back to school!!! oh what about a stew isn’t it nice to be wet and cold SHUT UP I ALREADY GRIEVE THE LIGHT YOU KNITTY NERDS.”

While I might not have phrased it exactly like this myself, it’s hard not to concede the point. The autumn people reappear each September, rosy-cheeked and as bright-eyed as squirrels. Each September the catalogues sell back to us this wild fetishisation of the dying of the light, swathed in cashmere and tweed and twining vines. (Dylan Thomas wouldn’t stand for it; and while Keats might be all for it, forgive me if I don’t take advice on Autumnal damp from the tubercular dead.)

For it’s a very particular kind of autumn, the autumn in writing; the autumn for sale. It’s not a city autumn, not really—although striding down cobbled streets is always popular, and so is laughing in parks. Autumn in the city is mostly shame-faced scrabbling in your purse for something for the beggars on the Overground, of never being the right temperature for anything—jumper and big coat on the rush-hour Central line = instant sauna—of SAD lamps, Vitamin D tablets and trying to discreetly hoik your tights up on the 205 bus. It’s not even a country autumn, by actual country standards: there’s nothing picturesque about acres of mud, and waiting for years for late buses at lonely bus-stops in the dark, and the house never getting warm no matter what you do.

Let’s call it a prestige autumn, an autumn of unimpeachable and timeless Englishness. Now, look. It’s not—of course, it’s not—a political statement to love autumn. I have a nearly fatal case of Autumn Girl myself. I write this from the Cotswolds, where the hills are ablaze with turning oaks and beeches; where the old gold limestone glows even under a thick soft grey blanket of cloud; where the canal shines like jet, studded here and there with slowly-sinking amber leaves. I am swathed in the kind of blankets sold by the National Trust for a simply staggering sum of money. There are lamps with copper wires in the bulbs. Later we are going to cook something in a large cast-iron casserole. We may go for a walk among the leaves and along the canal. I will enjoy it very much. It would be unfair of me to even hint that loving autumn is a political statement.

Except it would be very difficult to write about autumn without reckoning, in some form, with the darkness. Autumn is darkness, and all the roaring fires and dancing candle-flames and copper-strung fairy-lights are only here to fight it back a little. And to do that, the darkness must be acknowledged. We have to acknowledge that when we draw the curtains and shut the shutters, there are things out there left out in the cold. More than that, we must acknowledge that the whole point is that there are things left out in the cold. The whole point is to light the bonfire and watch it blaze out before us: no light without shadow, no fire without smoke.

There’s nothing new to say about autumn because it belongs to something old and ancient: tribes around a fire, or little mammals hibernating until the warmth returns. There is a reason that every culture has a festival of death and a festival of light at this time of year, and that sometimes they’re one and the same. The rosy-cheeked back-to-school lovers among us are only following the schedule of the harvests, after all. Children only sing songs about the apples being ripe and the plums being red because we all know, on some level, that the natural condition of the world is hunger.

Light your candles, bundle up your blankets, make your nest and bring in your stores. The year is dying, the summer is gone and we must go in.

And this, of course, is why the whole thing’s so impossible, and so complicated once you start to unpack the Pumpkin Spice Picture at all. How can we hibernate when there’s work to be done? How do we shop for new jumpers when the news is what it is, on and on? How can we enjoy being outside if we don’t know that soon we can go back in? Like a lit window in a storm, the joy of autumn is finding the places the darkness is not. How can we enjoy the dark if we don’t know that we can simply light the bonfire, turn on the heating, switch on the lamp?

I don’t have answers here, by the way. I’m only asking these questions as they occur to me, writing this, lamplight, blankets, rain gently drifting down the valley and against the windows, mist somewhere over Cheltenham Spa.