Happy Squirrel Days In A London October

We are stocking up for winter, pulling out woollens, keeping one eye on the football while stirring the first thick soup of the season

- Ruchir Joshi

Normally, I'm not a big fan of the autumn in England. Most years the summer that's just ended leaves me with a feeling of having been shortchanged, of not enough properly warm days, of too much rain, and the fall weather that arrives feels like a debt collector come to demand interest on a loan that you've used up without any pleasure or profit. Not this time, though. This year, the first days with a proper autumn bite provided extremely welcome relief from relentless heat. Even the first cold rain, normally about as welcome as a bout of flu, seemed to be a harbinger of some normalcy maybe the glaciers were pausing in their melting, maybe the planet was righting itself after teetering on the brink. Of course, this was a fantasy we now know that the ice caps, northern and southern, will melt in a race with each other, and various bits of continents will then behave with erratic incontinence, popping up or pushing down in ways that are completely unpredictable. But the morning weather in this London October helps you to stave off those dark, pessimistic thoughts. The air is what the French call `frais', meaning fresh but also crisp and cold, something that opens up the atmosphere and provides a break from the sultry bubbledome of the hot season.

Leaf and belief