AUTUMN FALLS

I used to quite like the Autumn. In fact, I might even go as far as to say that it was once quite my favourite time of the year. The bright glare of Summer was fading, the trees turned to rich or golden colours, and there was a snap in the air that made your breath visible and the moisture seemed to glisten as we all drifted slowly back into the darkness with the prospect of Christmas time at the darkest moment to try and cheer us all up.

I like it less so now, though.

Now it seems to bring along with it a sense of loss, a sense of decay, a sense of things falling apart. No other time of the year seems to give quite such a vivid demonstration of entropy in action and attempts to scream in our faces a daily reminder that everything has its time and everything dies.

And, like death, it strikes quickly.

Barely a week on from summer’s last hurrah, that one glorious day that somehow manages to appear on or around the Autumn Bank Holiday weekend, the mornings seem dark, the temperature plummets and the woollens need fishing out as the shivering begins and people start to look significantly towards the thermostat and imply that it might be time to at least consider putting the central heating back on.

It’s as if all the warmth has gone and I fear it might never return.

On a more practical level, it means unremitting rain and driving in the dark and ice forming on the windscreens and feeling cold all of the time. It means all those golden leaves falling to the ground and turning to black sludge and another year ticked off and decay and death and hibernation is all around me and I just start to feel older and somehow less sure about things than I once was.

You see, there’s been a death in the…

Well, I can’t say “family” exactly, but certainly close to it.

Literally at the same time as one aging member of my less than hugely extended clan was having surgery, her “significant other” was dying in another hospital in the next city over which, as you will no doubt understand, has led to a somewhat “complicated” situation arising.

Not so ridiculously complicated that there are “legal” ramifications or anything like that, in fact since that moment, things have been unfolding, as they generally do in these situations, all rather smoothly and with a kind of practical efficiency that I find all rather disturbing really, as if we can all be neatly packed up and packed into our boxes and it can very quickly seem as if we’ve never been here at all and never were.

There is a kind of “knock on” effect to all this, of course, but then, well, isn’t there always…?

Perhaps it was just the timing and the simultaneous arrival of Autumn’s chill, but now I’m just seeing death and decay all around me. I can’t even see a young person passing me in the street without visualising them fifty or sixty years older and falling apart just as they themselves are pulling their lives together.

And as I become ever more aware of the disintegration of the flesh and the functionality of the body by the simple process of observing the aging process and how it is tearing apart those closest to me, I can’t help but transpose those ailments and problems on to the bodies of everyone I see just wandering around, living their lives and looking like they are oblivious and don’t have the slightest care in the world, even though their own body is scheming against them, planning to fail and eventually bring even the very best of them down to earth with a crash, a burn or an intimate failure of some kind.

This doesn’t half put your mind in a very bleak and extraordinarily dark place in your day-to-day dealings with any and all of the human race… I find myself looking at each and every one of you and all I see is that you’re falling apart, and then I look in the mirror and so am I…

Ian Dury once had a record out called “4000 Weeks’ Holiday” which always seems to resonate with me at these sorts of times because, if you’re lucky, you get 4000 weeks and few of us get many more than that.

Some of us get less.

But if you can barely even remember the first couple of hundred, and you’re crumbling away for perhaps the last thousand or so, suddenly the remaining 2800 suddenly seem far to precious to waste on mundane things like jobs and mortgages and blogs…

Enjoy your holiday, my friends, whilst you still can. Autumn’s here and when Autumn is here, can winter be far behind…?