The Season Review

We are heading into autumn. I know this because my calendar tells me so. I ignore the complicated rules on when each season starts and ends. I prefer to chop the four of them up into blocks of three full months each, and autumn is September, October and November. But even without a calendar, I’d know that we’re heading into autumn. When I leave the house for an early shift at work, it’s dark. The temperatures have dropped markedly in the mornings and evenings.

The leaves have begun turning shades of brown, yellow and red. Some trees are noticeably thinning already, like a gentleman entering the twilight of his life. The leaves of the grand old oaks, which are slowest to appear in spring, cling on the longest in autumn. They will still be there come November. And there are the conkers, freshly dropped from the leaves of the horse chestnut tree, just in time for schoolboys to do battle with each other at the beginning of the new school term.

It’s been a funny year so far, hasn’t it. I suspect Chronos wakes each morning to a full looking inbox full of complaints as to how 2020 is proceeding. I can imagine some of the language he is likely to find in the suggestion box for 2021. But, here in the U.K. at least, we can’t grumble about the weather. It’s been glorious. The moment Boris Johnson announced back in March, with surprising honesty for a politician, that a lot of us were about to die, the sun came out and bathed the realm in joyous light and warmth. It’s been heavenly. For those of us who dodged the fatal tentacles of the coronavirus, anyway.

It’s been almost constant sunshine, day after day, week after week, month after month. A perfect English summer converted seamlessly into a very pleasant Indian summer. But, I’m sorry to say, all good things must come to an end. Autumn is here. Temperatures will drop. And the usual crop of seasonal diseases will make their presence known. Along with the newest addition to their number, the novel coronavirus.

Boris Johnson doesn’t want to be the PM that has to tell the population twice in a single year that lots of us are going to die. So he left it to the medical experts, Messrs Vallance and Whitty to explain the obvious to the nation this morning. With a selection of slides that even a simpleton can understand, they delved through a few scenarios. The end result of each being, I’m sorry to say, that lots of us will die.

Mrs P and I will continue our daily walks along the beach and through Bournemouth gardens. Unlike diseases and weather patterns, we are more permanent fixtures. We hope. As are you. We hope.