November

A time of dying. And the remembrance of death. The light is sharpening, draining out: paper poppies fill the space in the summer palette which will now be usurped by grey and rust as winter looms. Clocks go back and suddenly it’s cold and dark at 5 pm and we are all made melancholy…

Except it’s not like that at all. Some days the sky is a Wedgewood shade of celadon and there are golden roses budding, opening and falling in a flimsy of sweet-smelling petals. Orange-scarlet nasturtiums are still twining through rampant leaves. Everything is very much alive and somehow this feels wrong. The clammy air is warm as spring and the previously tidied-up, clipped lawns and hedges sprout untidily again. Small birds speed manically through urban gardens. And the light is not so much failing but concentrated in small forensic bursts and slants painfully reminiscent of an ophthalmologist’s slit lamp.

Then it rains and rains and the air is still warm. There are MOSQUITOES, for heaven’s sake. South London is reverting to the swamp it once was. A dystopian undertone alarms us all. And in the shops, already, Christmas shouts and waves at us even as the bonfires and fireworks finally sputter out.

We don’t know where we are. At my age, this matters. I’m done with novelty; surprises. I like familiar miseries; I have my coping strategies for those. A glass of good red wine; a book; the closing of the curtains on the cold and dark outside. Respect. Not love. But acceptance of a sort.

It’s been a perplexing year. Nothing has been constant except for the ever-growing certainty of an overheating planet. Prime ministers came and went and it often seemed as though the only fixed point was the thermometer.