Thank you for this blog topic, @rambo, @missy and @lyxzen. It got me thinking and got the creative juices going too. The ‘fall’, however, is always going to be ‘autumn’ for me, I’m afraid. :)
What do I look forward to at this time of year? A good question. Before I answer it, let me just point out that I don’t especially like Hallowe’en. I know that’s tantamount to heresy on this site, but there you are. I’m just about old enough to miss the insurgent Americanisation of Hallowe’en over here, so for me Hallowe’en is about bobbing for apples, eating toffee apples and witches flying around on broomsticks doing unspeakably unpleasant things to small children. It isn’t about trick or treating or dressing up or elaborate pumpkin carving. I should point out that all those things are perfectly fine if you like them, but they’re not hard-wired into my DNA in the same way they are with Americans on this site or, for that matter, many of the kids I teach.
That said, there are things about the autumn, I’m really looking forward to.
Colour and sound. Autumn is fairly obviously a time of colour. It’s a time for words like russet, ochre and umber. It’s a time for trees to catch fire in a final glorious conflagration before the death-sleep of winter freezes their naked limbs into cruel configurations of contorted wood and bark. But it’s also a time for drifts of leaves on cracked pavements. It’s a time for whispering, shushing, skittering and crunching. Autumn has cadences all of its own and I love them, particularly when they float on chilled air as your breath puffs away from you. The cold, the colour, the sound – all conspire to make you feel alive in a way that other seasons can’t quite manage. Magical.
Then there’s… scarves. Okay, this is a bit strange, I’ll grant you, but autumn is the time when I can begin to indulge my penchant for wearing scarves around the place. The longer they are the better. This is probably a holdover from my childhood when autumn meant, amongst other things, the return of Doctor Who and Tom Baker strode from the labyrinthine depths of his battered old police box with his toothy grin, floppy broad-brimmed hat and implausibly long multi-coloured scarf. (“Madame Nostradamus gave it to me. A witty little knitter.”)
Bonfire night. Unlike the USA, whose firework celebrations are to do with freedom and the founding of the nation, we Brits use our fireworks to celebrate the public execution of a Spanish Catholic terrorist who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament and assassinate the King. What can I say? We really are a bit odd. The 5th November never usually feels like autumn. It’s usually cold, sometimes bitingly so, and the nights are well and truly on the long side. But fire… Fire remains an eternal fascination for us human beings. Primitive, spectacular and vaguely threatening, a huge bonfire on top of which a crude effigy of the aforementioned terrorist is being cheerfully immolated remains an impressive sight. Plus, food. Jacket potatoes wrapped in tinfoil that keeps them scalding hot; parkin (a curious mixture of gingerbread, treacle and oatmeal); treacle toffee, and, of course, those toffee apples I’ve already mentioned are a staple of my childhood and still something I look forward to.
So, those are my three things, but I’d like to suggest a literary fourth, if that’s alright. You can’t talk about autumn (oh, alright, ‘fall’, then! :) ) without mentioning the man who’s probably the best writer of October stories the world has ever seen. He gets Hallowe’en; he gets autumn. And his disturbing stories of mysterious carnivals and leaf-strewn streets are indelibly burned in my memory. I am, of course, talking about Ray Bradbury. Fall is the perfect time for the author of The October Country and Something Wicked This Way Comes and I shall be dipping in to at least a couple of his collections during the next few weeks.
I hope you have a wonderful season, however you choose to celebrate and enjoy it!
