September commences the waning third of the year. October is where we start the waning quarter. All pretence of clinging to summer now becomes untenable, as does any attempt to ignore that most dreadful phenomenon of the later months — the long countdown to Christmas. Yesterday I was in a branch of Home Bargains and found an aisle which encapsulated this perfectly; solidly packed with Halloween decorations on one side and Christmas on the other. A fortnight earlier I went into a B&M across the road and found among the confusing maze of aisles a few which were entirely Christmas-dominated, a couple which were all Halloween and a small, pathetic half-section offering huge discounts on the remaining stock of beach buckets. We’re also past the autumnal equinox, of course, and it is rare now to maintain daylight past dinnertime. I had spent most of the preceding season reading The Book of Lost Tales in my garden, but getting through the rest of the series in that manner will be difficult now that most of the time it’s either dark or raining. Artificial light is needed more and more to make up for the loss of the natural and, indeed, daylight savings will take effect on 26th, which is what makes October longer than the other 31-day months. I think back to John Finnemore’s song about 5th February being the Most Miserable Time of the Year “with Christmas a distant memory and summer still far away”. A song about the converse situation would probably put the key date around 12th October. Of course, as I discussed some years ago, lots of TV shows have already recorded their Christmas specials by now, which must only further feed a sense of dissatisfaction from linear time.

The Met Office reported that the summer of 2025 was Britain’s hottest on record, and the record has been set several times already this century. This kind of commentary seemed to peak just after the Glastonbury festival, with lamentations that the tradition of the “washout” now seems to have quietly died. The British still stereotype themselves as living in a cold, wet country but the reality is that we are fast becoming a war, dry one, hence a growing public outrage about the low availability of air conditioning. These complaints are likely to resurface in the next few summers, but for now they have abated… because we’re moving into the colder months now and thus looking forward to panics about the cost of heating. I remember that in 2022, as an inflammatory heatwave was only just receding, there were already warnings of “warm hubs” being needed in the winter so that the poor didn’t freeze. I can’t help but feel that if we were collectively capable of thinking more than three months ahead or behind then we likely wouldn’t be in either of these messes.