October 2026
Listening over breakfast one morning to the Radio 4 Today programme, I heard a man from Kew Gardens telling us that – unusually for the season – trees were still in full leaf, and that foliage remained green, with no display of autumn colours.
Did this person live in the same country as me? Were Kew’s 500 acres of woodland really so determined to buck the trend and cling to summer? He explained that warm autumn temperatures encourage trees to hold onto their leaves to continue photosynthesis. This, he said, draws out the season and prevents a simultaneous colour change across the canopy. No doubt this is true, but…
… on that same morning, in mid-October, I could see from my window hedgerows of rich russet, ochre, burnt siena, with the occasional smudge of burgundy. That morning I had walked through deep drifts of fallen leaves with a satisfying and sussurant swish as I went. Pace the expert from Kew, at my feet was the palette of autumn: tawny orange, copper, umber, chestnut.
Here’s the science: leaves change colour in the autumn because shorter days and cooler temperatures signal trees to stop making chlorophyll, which is the green pigment they use to make food from sunlight. The point the gentleman from Kew was making was that this year the weather was as warm as some summers. Indeed we seem to have enjoyed almost six months of summer temperatures.
Now, as the month ended, some trees were already bare, victims of two storms that tore through, one ferociously following on the heels of the previous. We are told that the El Niño phenomenon will bring us a stormy winter. Oh for the autumns of old! By now we’d have have the first frosts, the blue and silver champagne mornings, the crunch under foot. Winters now are predominantly wet and warm; Christmas is often milder than Easter.
Autumn is truly here now. We have returned to Greenwich Mean Time, darkness falls early, and fires may be lit. The season brings with it the ghastly and ghostly Hallowe’en. When my children were small it was celebrated in a minor way at little expense; black bin bags were turned into witches’ cloaks, and that was about it. There were perhaps some traditional games such as bobbing for apples. Now this predominantly American-imported Halloween (note the absence of apostrophe, signalling how far it has been divorced from the original All Hallows’ Eve – the Feast of All Saints on 1 November) has now cemented itself as a major event in the British retail and cultural calendar, with annual consumer spending projected to exceed £705 million, and it has all but eclipsed long-standing but home-grown traditions such as Guy Fawkes Night.
In our villages it gives rise to some creativity, with carved pumpkin heads set outside gates, and ghoulish decorations and scarecrows along the streets. This year, somewhat against my better judgment, I went to a Halloween-themed quiz, organised by the Suffolk Coastal Pétanque Alliance (and more of that later), and succumbed to requests to dress up. I am ashamed to say I ordered the cheapest get-up from Amazon, and appeared as the Grim Reaper. I might have done better with the bin bags…
Not to be outdone, my dog attended a Halloween/Traitors-themed scent workshop the next day (I am, you must understand, merely a taxi service for her social life – scentwork, tracking, rally, agility). Scent work is her one great skill, apart from eating, and there is an ongoing rivalry between her and a rather snooty and superior Weimaraner. She holds her own staunchly.
As the month ended came news that the old lady (in fact only four years older than me) who lived up the road had died. She was part of the old order: my children when young, some four or more decades ago, would cycle the two or three miles from the village where we lived to buy goats’ milk from her. Only a few months ago she was showing me her collection of 300+ teapots. Another familiar part of life here gone.
And November, where we now find ourselves (I am writing at the end of its first week, somewhat late), is the month of the dead. We remember our loved ones at All Souls’ Tide (2 November), and we honour the ‘fallen’ around the eleventh of the month. I found myself recently telling a dear friend of my decade of death from 1982 through till 1991: my mother first, much missed; then an aunt who died in my arms; then the trauma of my husband’s end; and finally the suicide of my fiancé a few weeks before our planned wedding. Others too have gone – friends and lovers. So many to remember.
To Southwold on All Souls’ Day to meet a friend for coffee. Mindful of the season, I called into the Catholic church there. What does this fortress say to us with its battlements and arrow slit windows? What image did its architects want to convey of the Church? To the outsider it looks like a statement of defended power.
I have mentioned pétanque, my new-found passion, before. Some 16 months ago I saw an advertisement for a local club on social media, and went out of curiosity and a nostalgia for evenings in village squares in southern France, and old men drinking pastis, the click of boules, and the occasional cry of “carreau!” I love it, and the club is a welcoming – though somewhat geriatric – one. It is such fun. It has taken me over body and soul, and – despite my very clear lack of skill (I am the weakest link) – I now play for the ‘B’ team in the winter league. Watching videos of championship matches in France has become an addiction – in some faint fantasy hope that talent and technique may be acquired by osmosis.
And so we creep into the dark of the year again. The ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggity beasties of Halloween have been banished once more. Talk now is of Christmas. Another year will be on the way out. How many more shall we see?
