Tuesday 17 October 2023

Favourite things about this time of year

 

What is your favourite thing about the autumn?

Do you have any meals you like to cook as the weather gets colder?

Do you have any traditions for this time of year?

 

What I like best about the transition from the warmer months to the colder months is the fact that the reduction in ambient temperature demands that I power up the eye-wateringly expensive, oil-fired central heating, which means that the bathroom can be heated, which in turn means that I can finally enjoy a bath for the first time since May. I derive extraordinary Friday-evening pleasure from a long, relaxing soak in a hot bath with Epsom salts. I usually read for an hour, later snoozing gently, before washing and then dragging myself out of the bath, physically wrung out as though I myself were the bath towel. The bath water is used over subsequent days to flush toilets.

In the hotter months, I rarely prepare roasted meals. Once the weather deteriorates, on Sunday evenings I peel (homegrown) potatoes, shop-bought carrots and parsnips, par-boil them, and then roast them all, the potatoes sprinkled with salt, pepper and homegrown rosemary. I grind nuts and bread (homemade), to which I typically add okara (the residue from the plant milk I make), herbs and spices, and roast this alongside the vegetables. There may be brussels sprouts or calabrese broccoli from the garden. I make an onion (homegrown) and sage (sadly, shop-bought) gravy. Preparation time: 90-120 minutes; eating time: 20 minutes. The roasted potatoes can be exquisite.

No traditions. As a child, I collected horse chestnuts with great enthusiasm, but played 'conkers' quite poorly (I was no better at 'marbles'). I remember on one Sunday failing to take up my role as a choirboy at the local parish church because I spent the morning illicitly gathering horse chestnuts. However, I am appalled by Halloween, to which I respond involuntarily by returning closer to my Judaeo-Christian upbringing, even though I am a lifelong atheist (I was choirboy because I was able to sing in tune, and because I wanted the pocket-money).

The reduction in day length means that there is much more darkness. This can be lit up with festivals of light. When I lived in Durham, I loved the Lumière: it was magical.

In contrast, I detest the explosions that increase in frequency over the weeks leading up to 5 November - to me it sounds like shell-fire, as though a military incursion were underway. My tinnitus is badly affected by loud noises. The air quality deteriorates from all the burned-up chemicals. There are always people who are injured by fireworks, and out-of-control bonfires that have to be doused by the fire brigade. Needless to say, I stay well away from firework displays and (satanic) nighttime bonfires. Although the festival of Diwali, compared with Bonfire Night, is more about lamp lights, fireworks remain important in the celebration. The festival of lights that I might one day embrace is a secular version of Hanukah, in which I would remember in the candlelight all my relatives and friends who have died: my father, my sister, my uncle, aunt and cousin (very recently); my wife's parents, aunts and uncles; my friend Martin; various work colleagues, counselling clients and Quakers. I know that what I have written sounds sombre, perhaps bordering on the morbid, but I deeply believe that, as in Japan's Dai Bon festival (which I saw in Kyoto), there should be an annual occasion in Britain when personally and privately (i.e. not publicly) we celebrate the lives of those we have lost. (In a contrast that could not be more stark, I deeply resent the public nature of remembrance, and thereby a kind of national glorification, of British military personnel (including two of my great cousins) who died on the battlefields of the First World War, pro patria mori.) Late autumn seems to me to be the right timing for such a private and personal celebration by candlelight.

Change-of-mood: in the lo-o-ong lead-up to Christmas, some excellent Belgian beers appear in the shops, and I am extremely fond of Guilden Draak (Golden Dragon) from Ghent, although I have been sadly unacquainted with it in recent years.