Richard Hogan: This is why autumn is my favourite time of year

I often think about how much nature meant to me as a child, especially when I'm watching children on their devices today, heads down, missing nature all around them

Richard Hogan. Picture: Moya Nolan

Oh autumn! Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Where the wild wind rides the darkening landscape of yellow and red. Daylight ebbing away, warm evenings by the fire. 

Smoke swirling in little plumes from houses. The sun blazing a little softer. Mornings clearing leaves from the window wipers. The wink and nod to a neighbour brushing golden shards into a bin. I have loved autumn all my life. Ever since I was a young boy walking to school. It was the only antidote to the intolerable dread going back to school provoked. I hated primary school; long hours sitting in a cold prefab, chalk on the boards, lessons about Paul agus Sheila who were constantly ag imirt péile. 

I couldn’t understand what that had to do with my life and who I wanted to be. I knew there was a life out there I wanted to go towards, but felt school was getting in my way. Dyslexia didn’t help my enjoyment of education in the 1980s. But autumn always cheered me up. I love all the seasons, but autumn has a special place in my heart.

I started walking to school at a young age with my brothers. Bag wobbling on back, my mother nervously waving us off. Down the muddy patch us young adventurers traversed, the morning light breaking over roofs of grey houses in Shamrock Lawn. 

Friends joining as we slowly moved towards school. Talk of homework, which teacher was mean or funny, Manchester United, and what player we were hoping to get when we next bought football stickers. Ian Rush was hard to find. 

The final hurdle; a damaged, tramped fence and then into St Columbus Boys National School. This was 1980s Ireland. Ray Houghton had put the ball in the English net, Ronnie Whelan had scored that incredible overhead kick. The country was beginning to believe that we could ‘give it a lash’. 

The sun seemed younger then, and when the leaves started to fall I knew summer was leaving. With every leaf that fell, winter was closer. But September made palatable all that school work, because I knew a treasure trove of acorns and conkers were coming. 

I’d spend the day in class looking out the window and watching the rough breeze in the tress. Hoping they’d help to loosen the conkers. I loved climbing trees. I was once a great swinger of mighty oak, and horse chestnut tree. 

I’d be up there, jumping on the branch to shake the bounty free. They’d fall in great waves, bouncing on the ground below. Friends running to catch them. I’d bring them home. My mother waiting at the door. The fire lit, skirts and kidneys or stew waiting. I’d toast McCarthy’s bread later on the fire. Sleeve covering hand so it didn’t get too burnt. My grandmother smiling, watching on. 

Oh, but real butter, and milk with toast gently cooked from a real fire. I have yet to have a culinary experience as spiritual as it. Later when the evening moved on, and my father came home, I’d go upstairs and start to rifle through the collection of conkers and acorns I had collected on my way home from school. 

I would treat them with super glue, or whatever the latest trick was. There was always something that you heard that might magically hold them together when they were in a contest the following morning walking to school. Meticulously, I would drill a hole in the conker, with this tiny tool I had acquired. 

With painstaking precision I would drill the smallest hole in the conker and feed through my grandmother's strongest thread. All that evening I would test out the conker. It would be next to me as I went off to sleep. One year, I had the greatest conker ever, it beat everyone that year. I called it ‘Rocky’. It used to sit on my table next to my bed, dents and bruises from battle on it, but it never lost. 

When I took him out of my school bag, he created fear among the onlookers and potential combatants.

It’s funny now to think of those days and how the seasons meant so much to us young children. Nature was so much apart of our childish play. The seasons were a character in our lives. Rain was a tormenting enemy. 

School tours, walks to the local farm or sports days postponed due to its presence. I hated it as a child. Cursed it, wished it had never been invented. 

But nature was a gift. Nature gave us children so much. I often think about that today, watching children on their devices, heads down, missing nature all around them. 

I know that’s nostalgia’s way, but I can’t help feel they are missing out on all the fun we had. All that sense of community and synchronicity with the world. It seems sad to me, I guess like that swinger of oak and chestnut tree, it was a way we used to be and is no more.