An Ode to Autumn

It’s one of those perfect Sunday afternoons. My two small children are asleep at the same time, my husband has gone elsewhere to watch football and I’ve just added a big lump of turf to a fire that was lit at 11am and so has reached that perfect level of warmth that makes every other room in the house feel Baltic. I have one eye on the TV where the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is playing (yet again) and the other on my phone where I’m watching Clodagh McKenna make a stew topped with delicious carby, herby dumplings.

Autumn is my season. The Sunday before I wrote this we were in the garden with friends, basking in late summer sunshine but as if flicked by a switch, the weather turned with the calendar. Almost the moment September became October the wind picked up, the rain poured down and the temperature dropped enough to make fleece socks a necessity. I danced a little jig.

Summer is nice, on the days when it cooperates, but I don’t like the disappointed moaning that comes with the overcast ones. Spring is a little overly optimistic for me with its green shoots and frolicking wildlife. Winter is great but brings with it packed shopping centres and too many social invitations.

But Autumn, autumn is perfect. Nights draw in and as they do it’s perfectly acceptable to batten down the hatches. There are no expectations in the autumn. October is a shoulder month. After the freneticism of back to school September, it’s a time to reset and reassess. September can be full of Indian summers but October has clear crisp mornings, crunchy leaves to stomp through and big puddles to jump in. Sweaters and jackets in caramel and khaki reappear and the mish-mash summer wardrobe that I’m never fully sure of is consigned to its winter home.

But it’s not just knitwear that is pulled from the same under bed storage we all have from Ikea. No, the big duvet is pulled out of the back of the wardrobe and acts, for me, like those weighted blankets that are advertised on Instagram to help with anxiety. I’m calmed by the heaviness of it and how acceptable it is to be in bed at 9pm because we’re no longer wasting the beautiful summer evenings.

Recipes are swapped too. The search for a decent tomato ends as we move towards warming stews, casseroles, soups and cinnamon-scented bakes. Sundays can be spent around the kitchen table eating delicious crunchy, fluffy, roast potatoes instead of keeping watch for kamikaze wasps who seem obsessed with the Ottelenghi salads I attempt all summer. By the by, the secret to the crunchiest roasties is to toss the parboiled potatoes in semolina or polenta before you tumble them into the hot fat. It’s a Nigella tip and like all Nigella tips, it is perfect.

Like a very basic, Midwestern Christian blogger I decorate the house in pinecones, pumpkins and dried leaves bringing as much of the outside in. This is in contrast to the seven months of the year I, as a chronic hayfever sufferer, do everything I can to keep the outside out where it belongs.

When we moved into our new house in the country this time last year I was so excited to watch the green become orange and auburn and brown. To go for big walks in coats and boots with leaves crunching underfoot. To see houses decorated spookily for Halloween with lanterns and skeletons scaring me as I went for a stroll at dusk.

I forgot that living outside the city in a place so green it’s basically a St Patrick’s Day meme and surrounded by golden fields of barley and wheat would mean industrial strength antihistamines but I know that sweet autumnal payoff will be so worth it.

Ireland is at its most beautiful in these months before winter takes hold fully.

Sure, it’s a beautiful place to be on a sunny day but give me a cold misty morning in Kerry, near a lake with clouds so low they’re kissing water as still as glass. Let me stand on Burrow beach looking out to Ireland’s Eye on a day that is bright and clear and cold and imagine where the people on the airplanes landing in the distance are coming from. Let me stand in a field, surrounded by children dressed as witches and wizards and Minions watching fireworks and stealing sweets from their bags when they’re not looking.

Of course, it’s different this year. There won’t be any Halloween callers, there won’t be big rowdy Sunday dinners or travelling to different counties for weekends away. It will be smaller and cosier than even I, a dedicated autumnal misanthrope like. But it will be easier to cocoon now than in the height of summer when we were all missing festivals and family parties and big gloriously drunken weddings.

Having taken a break for some communal outdoor dining we can go back to group calls and Zoom quizzes and movie watching parties, checking in on friends who live alone or ones who live with people it’s hard to see 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

It’s time to light the fire or wrap up in a blanket and watch Netflix from start to finish.

All great TV is released either in October or January, schedulers know full well that series need to be complete before the end of November comes and we’re all expected to rise dramatically from our hibernation, draped in sequins, like some sort of Christmas butterfly, before collapsing exhausted five weeks later, spent from too much food and drink, shedding our sparkly robes as we crawl into January first, ready to live in half-sleep again until March.

And who knows if this year’s metamorphosis will happen. I hope it does, I really do. And maybe to make it happen it’s time for the whole country to relish Autumn as I always have; hidden under a blanket, eating the chocolate you bought for Halloween, didn’t give out and should really save for Christmas.

Jennifer Stevens, October 2020.

What is your favourite thing about the new season? Tell us in the comments below…