Edel Coffey: Hot weather in the middle of September feels a bit like having seasonal jet-lag
Writer and columnist Edel Coffey. Picture: Bríd O'Donovan
I had accepted summer’s no-show status by the time it finally arrived earlier this month.
I had already moved on to thinking about the autumn TV schedule, how to wear transitional fashion, and the return of the beloved 40 denier tights when our Indian summer swept in with its disruptive sparkly energy.
The kids were already back at school. It was a bit like the popular dinner-party guest arriving just as the rest of the party were putting on their coats to leave.
Now everyone would have to take off their coats and open another bottle of wine and ramp up the party again to accommodate the late guest.
Earlier this week, as the weather turned, my six-year-old stared out into the rain one morning before school and sagely announced: “I think the bad part of autumn has arrived.”
She had already started to think of the hot, dry weather we’ve been enjoying as the good part of autumn. I was surprised to find myself disagreeing that the shift in weather was the ‘bad part of autumn’.
Unseasonal hot weather just gives me sleepless nights now and of course the attendant existential climate angst. All I felt as the rain poured down and the humidity cleared was relief.
This impromptu dalliance with summer in the middle of September has been nothing short of discombobulating, a bit like having seasonal jet-lag.
The jumbling up of seasons feels even more acute when you live, as I do, in a seaside town, complete with amusements and a fairground that stays open as long as the weather lasts.
There is a bucket-and-spade shop (which becomes a Christmas tree shop in the winter), a promenade and a popular bathing spot, there’s even a caravan park, so the seasons are distinctly demarcated here, at least by visitors if not always by weather.
It’s a vibrant and busy place full of possibility in the summer but usually by September the best of the weather has departed along with all but the most tenacious of tourists and us locals settle into a quieter routine for the off-season.
Last week the village felt like it was still in peak season, with swimmers, sailors, revellers, and sunbathers all frolicking by the shore.
My kids were still going for night-time sea swims but the trees were laden with conkers; the Christmas tree is up in Brown Thomas but the Mr Whippy van was also still out on the prom selling ice-cream cones.
The mornings have already grown darker and yet, as I made my way through the village, I identified the tell-tale excitement of possibility that I usually feel at the start of the summer.
My body knew I was supposed to be closing off that feeling of anticipation that comes with summer, settling instead into the more practical workaday energy of autumn, tying up the loose ends of the year, but the excited shrieks of children on the waltzers threw me off balance.
September is what I think of as my admin season, the time when I knuckle down, finish things up and organise myself for the winter.
But this September I found I couldn’t get into that back-to-school state of mind. Instead I was frittering important nut-gathering time (sorry) by going for long walks in the sunshine and sipping iced coffees.
Maybe this seasonal jumble that we are experiencing is short-circuiting our own hard-wired seasonal patterns.
I definitely follow an inner seasonal cycle, a subtle energy shift that follows the changing of the seasons.
I am less productive during summer, for example, possibly a symptom of having children off on school holidays, but I think more likely to do with the general air of favouring adventure and outdoor activities over the year-round everyday chores and obligations.
From January onwards I work intensely, and spring is the time when I generate and create the most, in advance of the less productive summer season.
And then the cycle begins again. I didn’t realise how bound I was to those rituals of the season until the season started misbehaving and throwing me off my well-worn grooves.
And if our seasons stop turning in a timely manner, will our seasonal behavioural patterns become scrambled? Maybe that’s why I was so relieved at the arrival of the autumn weather last week. It just felt right, like it was time.
While my daughter was sad to see the weather turn, I felt the familiar trigger of a seasonal behaviour, that urge to get organised, put the head down and prepare for the winter.
In the last few days of blustery showers and downpours, as the leaves have started to fall and gust around the garden, I thought of how the changing seasons are so necessary as they give us the opportunity to reflect, shed the previous year if necessary, rest, recover, rebuild and hopefully, come spring — if spring comes — regenerate and renew.
