Are you a summer person? Because the autumn people are already winning
|
Version 0 of 1. Summer officially ends on Monday and, with it, the wearing of white and that feeling of being on vacation all the time. So, too, the ascendence of summer people over winter people. The calendar year runs January to January, but for many, that sinking, new-school-year feeling that comes around the first of September is the real start of the new year. How depressed the new season makes you – well, that depends largely on which season you think of as “yours”. I used to be a summer person. I used to think winter people were creepy, pale-skinned, slow-moving creatures who lived in long sleeves and probably cut up their burgers with a knife and fork. In England at least, where the sun comes out for approximately two weeks a year, there was, I thought, a deliberate perversity to those who complained about it. And then I moved to New York, where the summer is as bald and unrelenting as an English winter. Heat of 90°F with humidity isn’t cheering, it’s sedating – and keeps you inside as effectively as snow. There’s something angry about this kind of shadeless, hot weather that the novelist Jean Rhys described as the deathliness of summer afternoons and the particular sense of doom brought on by a hard-boiled blue sky. (She was writing about her native Caribbean, but, after emigrating, the English weather would come to depress her in entirely new and more profound ways.) Weather, as most of us know by now, effects behaviour at group level, and there are plenty of studies looking into the influence of the seasons on motivation and productivity. People are lazier in summer, but also more inclined toward aggressive behaviour. It is easier to concentrate in bad weather, when there are no fun outdoor alternatives to being stuck at your desk. I once spent some time at a police station in north London, where they told me that heavy rain is worth 20 officers on the beat; robbers, like the rest of us, don’t much like to go out in a downpour. All of this analysis misses the peculiar pleasures of each season itself, rather than the things it enables. Spring and fall hog most of the poets’ attention and you pick a side according to taste. Personally, I prefer autumn. Blossoms are nice and all, but after a while all that pink makes me nervous; there’s too much pressure to be enchanted by it. What exactly are you getting your hopes up for in spring? You know precisely where you are with a good autumn, picturesquely foreshadowing death and decline. In London, at the moment, it is as grey and rainy as you would expect for the tail end of summer; you already need to wear a coat and carry an umbrella. In large parts of America, the hot weather will continue for weeks to come, making a nonsense of Labor Day as the official end of the season. (Seriously: it should be pushed back by two weeks, like daylight savings. It is impossible to get any seasonal closure while the heat is still raging outside.) England does better at the liminal seasons and so autumn, which started around the middle of August as far as I can tell, officially arrived with a sigh of relief. Still, if you measure the years partly from summer to summer, there is always a slight lurch when another one comes to a close. “The summer is ended and we are not yet saved,” wrote Jeanette Winterson, famously, in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – her six-year-old alter-ego stitching the biblical quote on a sampler to the alarm of her classmates. (Everyone else stitched things like I Love Mummy.) And so we head into another autumn, trying to be better. |