14 highly predictable stages of Autumn

A seasonal rigmarole in search of that Meg Ryan feeling

Credit: Illustration from Los Angeles Herald in 1910.

It’s the season of the witch

• Every day I work to the backdrop of my preferred seasonal playlist: Vintage Jazz for Autumn. It will make you feel like you’re about to become embroiled in a meet-cute or write a book on a typewriter. There are various mentions of September/leaves/autumn and (this is how I get my kicks) occasional spooky songs, including undeniable jams such as The Yodelling Ghost.

• By mid-October, I alternate that playlist with the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack, playing This Is Halloween and singing along with unrelenting enthusiasm until my boyfriend bans it in his presence.

• I convince myself that fingerless wool gloves are a wardrobe essential and question why I don’t own any. Specifically, fingerless gloves with a fresh dark red manicure while cradling a coffee on a crisp day. The charming scene I’m picturing is almost certainly set in a park in New York, where I don’t live. There’s probably a stationery shop involved. I don’t even like my hands or nails, so I remember this and won’t buy fingerless gloves for another year.

• I go through the annual routine of declaring that I cannot allow another October to pass by without going to New York in autumn, ideally around Halloween. I check flights and hotels; they’re too expensive and I don’t go. As it happens, I did once make it to NYC for Halloween, and for the first time in its history, the Greenwich Village parade was cancelled because of a hurricane.

• I feel a gravitational pull towards pinafore dresses with tights, A-line suede minis and Margaret Howell kilts. They feel crucial to my being able to leave the house, this is despite not even owning a kilt or a pinafore and living in jeans for 348 days a year.

• All I want to wear are cable-knit cardigans and roll necks. My neck is too short, my face too round, and my hair too long to look good in a roll neck – I do not have the delicate bone structure of a young Mia Farrow. Despite this, I own six of them. God loves a trier.

• On Sunday afternoons, I check the five streaming services we subscribe to for You’ve Got Mail, then remember they keep it behind lock and key at this prime time of year, only accessible to saps like me for the princely sum of £3.99. The same happens with Practical Magic, so I watch Notting Hill again.

• I retire affogato for the year because I cannot stop thinking about three specific desserts, and they are: pumpkin pie, custard, and rice pudding. Not together, though I wouldn’t say no. The custard must be made with fresh vanilla seeds and will ideally form a moat around a fruit-filled pie or a stodgy sponge pudding. If desperate, I will eat it cold from the tub with chopped banana. The rice pudding has to be made with cream and vanilla, it can’t come from a can, and it should ideally be baked with a sprinkling of nutmeg on top. Pumpkin pie… well, that’s a nightmare to find in England, so I’ll just take whatever I can get.

• I wait a few weeks and then threaten to make the pumpkin pie because it’s too hard to find a good one in the UK. This happens every year and yet I’ve never made one. My boyfriend threatens to do the same – he’s also never made one. We will absolutely both say we’re going to make a pumpkin pie again this year. In fact, we’ve already bought the ingredients.

• Every hot drink is pumpkin-spiced, and I refuse to try or buy any of them because they’re tacky. I make disparaging comments about how grotesque they are while contemplating when to make my pie, using pumpkin-spiced mush from a can.

• There will be one idyllic day in late September or early October where there’s a nip in the air and knitwear is permissible, but it’s not cold, the sky is blue, and the leaves are starting to drop. It’s truly perfection, and it really is just one day. We all post photos of it with captions about Gilmore Girls and Meg Ryan. The next day, it’s warm and raining again.

• I crave hot chocolate as if I’m trying to reach my daily water consumption target. The first sip is liquid heaven, but by the end, I feel sick as a dog, I have heart palpitations, and I need to take deep breaths. I’ll forget and do it again the following day.

• I become possessed by the desire to walk through parks to see as many vivid red and orange leaves as possible, forgetting that this is London, where our native sycamores turn brown and frazzled and that’s about it. Vermont it ain’t.

• The weather obsession is off the charts. September is usually still as hot as August, and how are we supposed to transition into suede and cashmere when it’s warm enough to sunbathe? In October, it’s still mild but it rains for 31 straight days, so the leaves all turn to mush before I can admire their crisp shatter underfoot. By the end of October, it’s either freezing and we’ve transitioned to winter thermals or we’re having another freak heatwave. Either way, many complaints are made about not having an autumn this year.

  

Happy 1st October, friends!

E x