Here in Peterborough it’s 24 degrees on 29 September – Michaelmas Day. Colder in my house than it is outside but, after months of heatwaves, that doesn’t feel strange. This morning I wake up half an hour before my alarm and decide to just get up. I put on shorts and a t-shirt and run 4 miles with a headlamp in the gloom. When I get back to the house it’s still dark. I’m sweating.
It looks like autumn, but feels like summer.
On Thursday, it will be October. Will it feel like autumn then? The river is low and the garden is ringed with patches of dead grass. All my regular footpaths are dry and cracked. But my daughter is back at school, the park is littered with apples, and last night it was dark at 7pm. In town, the Bridge Fair is filling the night with screams and whizzing lights.
Michaelmas is traditionally a quarter day – time to settle debts and pay rent. Since I quit my job in July I’ve been getting more emails about loans and credit cards. “Mrs Crane, unlock your life goals”. Maybe I’m just noticing them more now. Obviously I am going to get a job and obviously I will one day have an income again. Obviously.
My mum used to say that we shouldn’t eat blackberries after Michaelmas because the devil spits on them. I think this just means they don’t taste very good and should be left for the birds. But this year’s blackberries never tasted good. They tried to ripen desperately in July then shrank to nothing – too wizened even for the birds to eat.
On Friday I took my dad out for a walk around Ketton. It was too long a loop for him and he was too hot in his zip-up sweater and cap. I insisted on linking elbows while we walked and could feel him trying not to lean on me. But when we walked downhill, I had to push my palm on his chest to hold him back from falling. There was a haze over the fields and purple shadows by every hedge and furrow. A farmer was rounding up her sheep and the sheepdog sniffed dad’s hand. On the track back to the car, exhausted, he spotted a clouded yellow butterfly. From the car on the way back home, another.
Clouded yellows are a migratory butterfly, coming to the UK from North Africa and southern Europe, most likely to be spotted in early autumn. Will this be a “clouded yellow year” when warm weather brings large numbers? Maybe. I am seeing cyclamen everywhere at the moment, popping up under trees like tiny candle flames. Cyclamen sleep through the drought of summer and emerge, thriving, in the autumn and winter. Animals and plants follow nature’s clock – a mix of ancient instincts and adapting to current events. I don’t know if humans also have a clock like that but if we do, I hope mine is working.
