Autumn. Bah.

I hate autumn. There. I said it. Controversial, I’m sure you’ll agree since it appears to be the whole world’s favourite season. Or at least it is according to my feeds on Twitter and Facebook. Lots of happy people describing the pretty colours of changing leaves, the burned oranges and reds in the trees; the fresher winds, the pumpkins, the soup for lunch and closing the curtains against the darker nights. Maybe it’s an American vs British thing. Over here, we don’t do pumpkins and, despite the attempts of the media and greetings card industry, we don’t really care about Halloween. For us, the end of October is not much more than a week before Guy Fawkes Night where we set off fireworks and think about having bonfires to commemorate several blokes who tried to do a V For Vendetta thing on Parliament in the seventeenth century. I say ‘think about having bonfires’ because I don’t know anyone who’s had their own fire in years (my dad used to do them – the last one I remember involved burning down a fence with a Catherine wheel).

 

You say autumn to me, and all I get is the image of cold mornings, dank afternoons and being shocked by sunset before 7pm. The time between the third week of September to when the clocks go back the last weekend of October is a pain in the arse because it’s nothing but messing about until it all gets much colder. Those four weeks are the non-committal period where the weather and the days lay on the sofa, refusing to get up and get a job.

 

I don’t mind winter. Not in a I’m a horror writer so it all has to be cold and bleak sort of way. It’s just that you expect short hours of daylight and wondering where the hell you put your gloves the previous March. Once we’re into winter proper, it’s fine, but the days of mouldering piles of soggy leaves and wondering if tomorrow, the temperatures in the high teens will halve overnight is just depressing. Summer’s gone. Spring is roughly three billion years away and it’s only going to get damper and greyer every sodding day until it finally stops messing about and winter kicks in. Say what you like about having to wear a woolly hat and having chapped lips, at least winter’s got some balls.

 

So, no, I don’t like autumn. Autumn is the meh of seasons.