From a writer’s notebook
16th of October
It rained on Tuesday night. Properly rained, for hours, the steady kind that doesn’t make a fuss about itself, and I lay in bed and listened to it going down into ground that has been begging since June.
In the morning everything smelled of itself again. Wet stone. The box hedge. That particular smell the lane gets after rain, which I couldn’t describe to you if you paid me and would know anywhere in the world.
Autumn has arrived all at once this year instead of easing itself in. The vines have turned and they’re not one colour, they’re about nine. The oaks hang on here until well into November, so there’s still green underneath all the rest of it. I walked up to the top of the ridge on Wednesday because it was one of those days you don’t waste. Cold enough for a coat first thing, then blue and completely still by eleven, and the whole valley laid out underneath looking like somebody had been at it with a paintbox and no restraint whatsoever. I stood up there getting my breath back and not thinking about anything at all, which is rarer than it sounds.
And then the grey days in between, which I love just as much. Rain on the shutters. Lamps on at four. Nowhere I have to be.
I lit the first fire of the year on Sunday. This is an occasion in this house! The chimney man came a fortnight ago and told me off at length about something I didn’t entirely follow (my French is good, but it is not chimney French), and then on Sunday I spent half an hour doing the business with the kindling and the old newspaper and getting it wrong twice before it caught. There is nothing like the first one. The whole house changes temperature by about two degrees and changes character by considerably more. The cat appeared within ninety seconds from wherever she’d been keeping herself, as if she’d been waiting since March for me to get on with it.
I bought rugs too. Two of them, from the place out past the roundabout that sells end of lines, both thick and old-looking and the colour of dried leaves. One in the library, one under the desk. My feet are warm for the first time in two winters and I have been meaning to sort this out for three years. Why do we do that? Why do we put up with a small daily misery for years on end when the fix costs forty euros and one afternoon?
That’s a thing I keep learning and keep having to learn again. The small practical fixes are not small. A warm floor under your desk changes how long you can sit at it, and how long you can sit at it is the whole of a book. It isn’t a lovely thought. It’s just true.
The rest of the week has been the work. Thirteen days of afternoons now and I’ve kept every one of them, which sounds better than it is. Turning up has never been my problem. I can sit at a desk from two until six for a year and quite enjoy it. What I can’t do is finish a thing and hand it over to somebody. That’s a completely different muscle and mine has hardly been used.
The middle has its spine and I’m going through the back half at the pace of a woman digging a ditch, which is the right pace and the one nobody ever tells you about.
The moon is a fat crescent in the afternoon sky, up before the light has gone, that pale daytime kind that looks as if it’s been left behind by mistake. Going to the half on Sunday and then filling toward the Hunter’s Moon at the end of the month. The paper is still under the pyramid on the desk where I put it on the tenth. Fourteen days to go and I haven’t looked at it once.
If you are settling into the turn of the year, the full Literary Prescription for Seasonal Living — books, poems, quotes — is waiting there.