After a summer of drab grey cloud and torrential downpours, September has arrived in a blaze of glorious gold. This weekend I had to dig out the standby bottle of Factor 50 I bought in May, in readiness for a repeat of last year’s heatwave, and the t-shirt I found in a charity shop in Southwold got its first wear. Better late than never.

But in spite of the sudden swooning warmth, you can feel autumn is almost here. The sun may be hot, but it’s low in the sky, and the garden is scented with the sweetness of apples. (The lawn is littered with them too.) Getting up early on Sunday morning to go down to my hut and write, the air was cool and pale as milk and my feet left a trail of prints in the silvery grass. The cobwebs on the hut windows were beaded with diamonds, and in the evening the moon had appeared over the vast copper beech tree four gardens along long before the credits rolled on the Antiques Roadshow (which is a definite marker of the seasons of the year, and of life.)

Autumn used to be my favourite season. If Instagram had existed in my teens and twenties (and I am profoundly thankful that it didn’t, for many, many reasons) from August bank holiday until Halloween my feed would have been wall-to-wall russet leaves, conkers, mugs of hot chocolate and the words of F Scott Fitzgerald and L.M. Montgomery, declaring that life begins again in the fall and proclaiming my delight at living in a world where there are Octobers. My complexion, figure and temperament have always been far better suited to cool weather, multiple layers of clothing and afternoons on the sofa than heat, shorts and the beach, so the onset of Autumn was cause for celebration. (Oh, the relief of being freed from the stinky tyranny of fake tan and swapping flip flops for sturdy boots!) The only downside to the woodsmoke-and-cinnamon-scented ‘ember’ months were the hefty house spiders that emerged (from whence was always a mystery) to lurk on the stairs and dart across rooms the moment my husband had left the building, keeping me and the daughters under a seasonal spell of low-key anxiety until late November at least.

This year I don’t feel quite the same. On the upside, I have long since overcome my fear of spiders (thanks to this brilliant course at London Zoo), but Autumn now brings demons of a different kind. There’s something unsettling about the change of season, the closing of another chapter (with its unexplored possibilities and unexploited opportunities) and the way its vivid moments have already become compressed into memories; flattened, folded away, fading fast. My heart still lifts at the smell of leafmould and the prospect of a crumble made from windfall apples and foraged blackberries, but autumn’s melancholy has lost a little of its romance and now just feels a bit.. well, sad. Yesterday I stood in the garden and watched a long skein of geese fly overhead (their formation only a little less immaculate than the Red Arrows, who flew over on their way home from Rhyl Airshow the week before) their honking call unbearably mournful in the soft dusk.

Earlier this year, I wrote about my new appreciation for Spring, so I suppose it’s natural that the reverse is true as the days shorten and the long vistas of summer shrink to a circle of lamplight. September has always been a month of change, and while this year is the first since just before the millennium that our family life has been free from academic timetables, it feels like our small world – slowed and suspended by the pandemic – has suddenly jolted into motion again and is spinning faster to catch up. This summer, changes have arrived as frequently as the downpours.

And I am in a time of transition myself, in many ways. Still a daughter and mother and wife, but navigating changes in the way those relationships play out in day to day life, and the time and attention that each role receives. Still a writer, but at a stage where I’m flitting between the book coming together in my head/laptop and the one that has long since been completed, which is now going through the exciting process of becoming an actual novel, ready to go out into the world. (Or, to be more specific, out into America, next August; I’ll let you know if other markets are in the offing.) Still me, I think, though not entirely recognizable to myself sometimes. Not quite sure who I am in this new season of life, or how I feel about it.

But the thing about seasons is that they come around anyway, regardless of how we feel. They are inevitable, (let’s allow ourselves to ignore the spectre of climate change, just for now) and there’s a certain reassurance in that; they go on, doing their seasonal thing, and the only choice we have is in how we meet them. Perhaps we need to fully embrace the drab afternoons and dark evenings, make friends with the spiders and get comfortable with the shadows beyond the lamplight, because those things – and awareness of the winter ahead – make crisp blue mornings and leaf-kicking walks all the sweeter. And this unexpected spell of golden September feel like a gift.