Dark Fillage ...

.... was — or maybe still is &mdash the working title of my widely ranging and wildly ambitious novel project. It also seems apt to describe a feeble attempt to expiate my seasonally consonant shadowy mood, which crept in under the threshold of my careless attention to such matters. I never much cared for autumn. It was the season when school resumed after the summer break ... and I never grew bored of setting my own agenda; by contrast I could easily lose the will to live before I even finished scratching in the names of the various classes on my school timetable card. Timetables and deadlines are the spawn of the devil ... and as good a reason as any for supposing that holy grail of the mythical WASP — the work ethic — is merely a satanically peverted hijacking of a previously less onerous doctrinal aspiration.

By God! I got it bad, ain't i?

For me, the seasons are not equal. Partly this is geographical. In these fair isles we don not endure much in the extremes of season. Mostly the climate is variably damp. If the grass is green it has rained recently, if it isn't expect rain. The sun will shine most days and when it does it mostly gives pleasant warmth and only at the extremes of its solstician variations is either truly feebly wan or hellishly fierce. It seems to me that most of my countrymen divide their years into four equal portions and call each a different season regardless of appropriateness. I am a little more pedantic.

Autumn begins on the Tuesday after the last Monday in August because that day marks the last week of the school holiday. From then on the trees begin their preparations for winter. The adults slowly wean themselves off cooking and eating outdoors and demonstrate this wimpish fear of Brittania's creeping damp by losing their Balearic tans and opting for a slightly paler orange shade of spray-on dye. Kids prepare to punctuate the long and drearily dreadful autumn school term — which of course ends in the ultimate child-spoiling fest — with the mid-term beano of legalised begging, which in the UK culminates in the drawn out firework season fusion of Guy Fawkes bonfire night, Hallowe'en and in many areas, Diwali and last year and this we had Eid as well. Well it's as good as night as any to mark the end of cook-out weather so for me, autumn ends on on November fifth.

At first sight this might make it seem that my winter gets a longer innings than it deserves and I admit that counting most of November as winter is certainly a problem; mostly because the weather is very rarely wintery. Proper winter begins in January but luckily it also ends there. My eldest son, my sister and mother all have birthdays in February and winter is no time to celebrate something as gay as a birthday so even if there is three feet of snow outside I, at least, do not lose grip on the sure knowledge that there be crocuses 'neath that cosy white duvet. And no thing of such fragile, simple beauty has any place in a dead season of frozen mud and bare-naked trees.

Spring then fills the gap betwen the rash of February birthdays — I mark its exact beginning as the day I see my first gold and purple carpet of crocuses — and it ends on the day before my own birthday, which is pretty close to the summer solstice. This gives the great Brit spring the better part of five months to demonstrate all the glories of nature, from the first crocus, through the first cuckoo, the first new potato, and culiminating in the first strawberry as the mounting pressure to declare the season formally ended becomes unbearable.

Summer is okay ... ish ... but, frankly, even if it lasted twice as long it would still be over too soon. Too often summer is a let down. Whether it be too hot or not hot enough it is always something of a relief to get to autumn and not have to worry about being short-changed.

So my current convention is better than the one I grew up with where autumn lasted until Christmas and winter reigned until Easter and spring was the term of school or university exams and summer was still not bloody-well long enough.

Besides autumn is a fine season for melancholy and I always drew an unseemly amount of pride from my restraint in setting a short span for having the blues. Winter would seem to be a much better time to have a raging depression (if that isn't an oxymoron I wouldn't know one if it bit me!) but I love winter with a perverse kind of joy. I love to watch the slow, rank, mildewed decay of the world. Drifts of dry leaves become a slimy mess, hedgerows, stripped of their greenery display their knotty, tangled, varicose legs buried knee-deep in a midden of nature's discards ... and, yeah, the odd chocolate wrapper, beer-can or condom too. But then if we aren't, too, a part of nature then I declare I have seriously misunderstood everything. Oh well.

It is truly weird then that I have been uncommonly dark in spirit these last couple of days. At first I was bemused by it, then I thought, what the hell, and decided to have a wallow in it. Then I realised why I had it. It isn't an organic thing. It isn't a return to my prior psychiatric crisis it's a genuine melancholia brought on by a sad idea that I picked up on and chewed over and over until I felt I had gotten as near as I could get to grokking it.

I put it away and slowly but surely my mood has lifted but the unencompassable breadth of the original idea .... Ah that needs telling too but maybe not just yet.