How to beat the autumn blues

You know that awful, gnawing, depressing feeling you’ve got right now? The one that notices how shockingly early the sun is setting and how shabby and played out and autumnal the borders are looking and how listless and flat everything feels what with no holidays to look forward to and the house empty of kids? The one that groans at the thought of all those uncompleted tasks and the mountain of hassle and nose-to-the-grindstone grimness which must be negotiated, somehow, between now and Christmas?

Well, I hate to say this but I haven’t got it. For possibly the first time in my life since my parents shipped me off to that horrid, spartan boarding school I called Colditz, I’m experiencing early September without the faintest urge to want to kill myself. I’m not thinking back wistfully to those calamari in the taverna by that secluded inlet or the fat, red ripeness of those Italian tomatoes or the azure stillness of the Mediterranean on that first morning dip because this summer hols, for once, I didn’t do any of that stuff.

I didn’t even have a holiday in England or Wales or Scotland. And that’s my secret. If you want to beat the September blues, stay home all summer and just carry on working. It won’t make you feel better but that’s not really the aim. What matters is that by the end of a summer at home, you’re inured to the pain, like the old lag in the POW camp, watching the newcomers arrive from their freshly crashed Lancasters, their silk scarves still fresh and clean from Blighty, their eyes bright with the prospect of camaraderie and imminent escape. ‘Hah! Let’s see if you’re so cheerful after a night on a bed where all the wooden slats have been removed to prop up the tunnels,’ you mutter.