Singing the end-ofsummertime blues

As September bids a melancholic farewell, John LewisStempel looks to the transformative power of Nature and our agricultural rites and rituals to stave off his regret at summer's passing for another year

- Michael Frith

SEASONAL Affective Disorder. SAD. Usually applied to depression caused by the dark of winter, but for me the crunch time is the end of summer, when the tart, over-ripe smells of autumn fruit come sniffing in, the day shortens and the night-time cold is a different sort of cold, a thinner, keener, bone-touching cold. Yesterday, in the faded lemony sunlight of the afternoon, a wasp stung itself to death on the sitting-room windowsill, its body spinning in crazed circles, as, outside in the garden, a robin sang its wistful September song. In the morning, a chiffchaff had sung briefly, halfheartedly, from the lime trees, themselves turning a jaundiced yellow, before exiting the country scene, the last of the summer warblers to so depart. As the ornithologist and politician Sir Edward Grey noted in The Charm of Birds (1927) the chiff-chaff's melancholic September notes are a 'sort of quiet farewell'.

This morning, by deus ex machina-caused perversity, I picked up, during a coffee break from updating the medicine records for our sheep, Ford Madox Ford's novel The Good Soldier, which opens with the line: "This is the saddest story I ever heard.' The End-of-Summertime Blues. No one factors how many winters they may have left in their life, only the summers.

What do you do? Well, you go outside. More than a century ago, Henry David Thoreau, the

American environmentalist and philosopher, made the sane observation: 'Staying in the house breeds a sort of insanity always.' The world is always worse indoors, but even a glimpse of Nature from behind glass can go a long way.