The Changing of the Seasons – A Confession
Something strange happens to me about this time of year. It’s always around September/October time as the last days of summer passes the baton to the first days of Autumn, in a shuttle relay, like at school. T-shirt clad when in sunlight and jumpered and jacketed in the shade, it’s an odd feeling. For me, it’s a time when unstoppable torrents of memories invade my consciousness without time, place or detail. I often feel all at once confused, happy and sombre. Why is it that ‘the inbetween times’ consume me like this? The vague and unconfirmed conclusion I’ve come to is simply the starkness of the passage of time, and the lack of noticing it. When the cold creeps slowly in it feels unexpected, despite the fact that this is the 29th time that it has happened to me. So I suppose as Epicurus or Jean-Paul Sartre would be only too happy to point out, I’m simply afraid of death. Rather than taking these changes as part of the nature of being a mortal animal, I lament their passing. Try as I might, I still do it.
Sweaty armpits and freezing hands, removing a jacket in a pub garden when in direct sunlight, clambering into thermal underwear to ride a motorcycle, leaving the house wearing three layers and having to gradually remove them the more skateboarding maneouvers you perform, feeling the blood flow back into your hands whilst drinking a hot drink, walking to work past dew covered leaves squinting in the days first rays, friends I haven’t seen in a while, sweating from a grotty stage and packing equipment into a freezing car outside, holding hands.
The same thing happens in Spring, but that’s not for a while, and it’s the other way round…
it’s called involuntary memory, everyone has it, and it’s horrible.
Well yes…often horrible.
It can sometimes be nice though. The smell of marmite (whisky hops) as you come out of Waverly Station in Edinburgh will always seem very romantic for me somehow.