I have a confession about November. I have already decided it’s my favourite, and it’s only just started.
I know, I know. Everyone says spring. Everyone says summer, with its long evenings and its Pimm’s and its general air of being on holiday.
But give me a grey sky and a bit of mist any day.
The photo at the top of this post is one of my favourites from a recent roll. Nothing much is happening in it, which is probably why I like it. A pine leaning slightly to one side, as if it’s trying to hear something. A yellow tree glowing quietly in the middle. Bracken gone the colour of toast. And a sky so white it might as well be a blank page.
The fog does that. It rubs out the bits you don’t need.
The far hills have gone soft and bluish. The nearby brambles are still sharp, with their last few red leaves hanging on. Everything in between is just a gentle suggestion.
I love that.
I think it’s why autumn suits film so well. Film doesn’t mind a flat sky. It takes the muted greens and the rusty oranges and somehow makes them richer, not duller. Digital would probably have tried to rescue the sky. Film just lets it be white and gets on with it.
I could learn something from that, to be honest.
There’s a particular sort of morning I wait for all year. Not a dramatic one with a golden sunrise and a flask of something. Just a damp, hushed, slightly sleepy one, where the air smells of wet leaves and woodsmoke and you can see your own breath if you stand still long enough.
The sort of morning where you put on the big coat.
The one with the pockets.
The one that smells faintly of last year.
I always end up with a pocket full of things. A conker, a bit of bracken, a leaf that was too good to leave behind. Bruce has stopped asking. He just finds them on the windowsill and says nothing, which is a kind of love, I think.
It’s also, I’ve noticed, a time of year when I’m gentler with myself.
Summer makes me feel I ought to be doing more. Out more, brighter, busier, more sociable, more tanned (never happens). Autumn lets me off. It says: sit down, have a cup of tea, there’s nothing to prove.
As someone whose body has recently decided to run its own thermostat, I find that very restful. Menopause has taught me many things, and one of them is that I am quite grateful for cool, damp air on my face. A foggy walk is practically a spa treatment.
One of the nicest things about it is how slowly you have to go.
You can’t stride about in mist. You wander. You stop. You look at a single yellow tree for far longer than is sensible, and then you lift the camera and wait, because the light is changing by the second and you don’t want to miss it.
Or you do miss it, and take the picture anyway.
That’s the other thing about film. You don’t know. You wind on, you click, and you carry on with your day, and weeks later a little envelope of surprises arrives. Sometimes it’s a lovely surprise. Sometimes it’s a thumb.
This one, I’m glad to say, was not a thumb.
I’ve been thinking about my dad a bit lately, too. Autumn does that. He was a man who’d have looked at this view and said something short and sensible about the weather, and then stood there for ages anyway.
I think that’s where I get it from.
The grief is quieter now than it was. It doesn’t knock the door down, it just sits in the room with me, like the fog. Soft round the edges. Not going anywhere. Oddly, not unwelcome.
I don’t know if that makes sense. It does to me, standing at the edge of a field with cold fingers.
So that’s my case for November.
The colours are warm even when the weather isn’t.
The light is kind.
The world slows down.
And everyone, for a few weeks, is allowed to be a bit blurry round the edges.
I’ll take it.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to find the big coat. I suspect there’s a conker in the pocket from last year, and I’d like to see if it’s still hanging on.