The seasons

Summer never seems like it was real until it’s over. I often find myself nostalgic, focused on a single happy photograph as proof of a wonderful season, but it always seems the memory is more vivid than the event itself ever was. Most often, I realise, that could have been the one sunny day in a summer of rain; at the time, I may have been generally sleepwalking through it all.

Come autumn, the nights can darken imperceptibly unless you have a strict daily routine which involves going outside at the same time every day. For home workers and students without lectures, in slippers all day, the cold creeps up into fingers tapping on keyboards until suddenly it’s 5pm and pitch black and the central heating clunks its way around the pipes, clumsy and warm. And it's winter, and how did that happen. Those days with the icy sunshine seem miles away from the heat of summer sun, sleeping atop sheets, cooled by a fan until the very depths of the night time, waking to the glare punching its way through inadequate curtains, squinting even in dreams. Now the sun casts gigantic shadows before it disappears so fast, catching the pools of glittering grass with its long, cool fingers, making the world look like a beautiful caricature of itself. Sometimes, on the coldest nights, the freeze can be felt beyond the skin, past the bones, and into the very core of being, until blood continuing to run through veins seems like a marvellous miracle, a scientific wonder, and life seems serene despite the cold; magical, almost, as though everything must make sense even though it doesn’t. It’s the type of illusion which can only be believable in the middle of the night, but the feelings it evokes cannot be disputed.