The first shades of Autumn have swept in recently, you may have noticed?
In the back of my head I’ve dreaded the moment when the light leaves our days and the damp, cool air returns. The summer has been fraught with wishes and movement. I’ve been back up to Edinburgh, making changes to life here in London and worrying about the true ultimate purpose of my existence. As you do.
Summer comes, with it a sense that the here and now must be seized, that the long nights can and should be enjoyed with longer nights and fuller days. The weight of expectancy slowly drags down all, my energy and mindset which struggle to keep up and the dusk and the leaves. Eventually we all succumb to the disappointment of summer.

Autumn then, should be a sad moment on the walk towards winter. But, trees steeped in melancholy renew me. The wishes and changes of summer have now become fruitful action. There is an underlying cold brooding fear, the undeniable presence of a winter yet to come but all this is swiftly countered by the realness of Autumn.

I’m lucky enough to live next to a park, I can feel the temperature drop as I turn homeward in the evenings. Mentally I always associate the personal viscera of late August and September with my childhood in the country, yet when I turn down the street each evening I’m gifted a glancing reminder. The cooler air and ripe leaves wash the streets with a scent I’d always attributed, rightly or wrongly, to hay bales. My brothers and I spent upto 15 years alone, cartwheeling and racing along endless rows of hay bales. The other smell, of new mud, is intertwined with the deceitful odour of hay bales or falling leaves. This, I’d associated with football and the struggle to play enough before darkness made anything else impossible. Nowadays, I can still smell mud with football in long weekend games in the park. The seriousness of this play has never abated, the focus and determination is now broken the night before. The disappointing decision to skip these finite games for the new season of professional football is always a anti-climactic one. Yet as winter deepens the importance of these games, across glass rather than grass, gathers and intensifies. The injured adult learns to anticipate these games as readily, and on occasion the prospects are as palpable. The niggling doubts will occasionally creep in however; “would he be as good in the park?” “would I be as good on that pitch?”
Years ago, these were the nights where play was serious, where looking up suddenly you would notice the darkness all around you, the only light from beaconing, open windows and doors of home, left to stand as the night rolled in harmlessly.

My mind has curled and yellowed this last while, the stress of seasons past creeping in. Leaves falling; will I pass the university course I have enrolled in? will I be able to find a new job? do I want to stay in London? can I share the contents of this blog with someone and reveal my identity? what is it I would like to do? will the failures and shortcomings of my past be reconciled one day in an imaginative romantic showdown?
These heaping thoughts have briefly stifled each footstep forward so that I was paralyzed.  This blog is a strange new age journal, a stepping stone between diary and commentary. My perspective preserved in bad editing and grains of ultra personal revelations or ventures. When I’ve been weighed down by too many factors it’s hard to write one thing – sometimes the best thing to do is to wait and write everything. If you don’t have anything good to say…

I’ve always had the impression that some great sorrow will befall me. That might be grandiosity, or realism. Some terrible event or decision… To take this awful metaphor to another extreme – a storm. A raging autumnal storm which blows all the leaves away, which cripples the tree and floods the ground. As I approach middle age this impression looms and falls. It puts everything into perspective and the risks or decisions which seem so crippling are minuscule. The fierce rains and winds will batter us eventually.

So here is everything; the culmination of worry, self-doubt and hope all pickled by a summer of drink and drugs and decisions. The overriding, overwhelming feeling now is of everything, of Autumn. The clam before the storm; walking home to the sound of Miles Davis, or trickling back on a bicycle, frozen and watching the world pass me. The realization midway through the 14-a-side 6 hour game of football that this is happening, that this is all real life. Listening to new music overwhelmed with hope. The last days of a bad job and the first glimpse of a colourful new season. The hope that Autumn may stretch out and last longer, that it may give us glimpses of the summer we didn’t get the chance to notice and enjoy. The hope that Autumn will be kind somehow, and that everything which went before will be of coincidentally perfect consequence, bathed in evening light and the dark pouring in is harmless. The wish that reality will live up to these ideas. The hope that replaces a wish, the cold which replaces the warmth and the work which keeps us warm.
The next good one is Spring we think, then winter surprises us. Hope, that they all live up to the majesty of the Autumn in waiting.

And all those leaves that we kicked around are gone- all the worries and doubts. We are sustained by them and now they are nothing – brief food for thought for budding insecurities. The blog which we didn’t know whether to share, the course we didn’t think we’d pass, the job we gave up or started. These decisions are already made and the kitsch nostalgia which is either brilliance or nonsense is already remembered or forgotten. The storm which waits or the late warmth we weren’t expecting. That is Autumn.

 

 

The metaphorical tree will fall soon.
You will die.

Mr Hummels