Talkin' 'bout the weather

They all said it was coming but I didn't quite believe them - how could I, standing there in the 20 degree pleasantness on a Wednesday afternoon in mid-October? Just another week, they'd said, just another ten days before the inevitable slide towards winter. But they'd been saying that for weeks now, ever since I'd got here -- that and their constant, ominous, pessimistic predictions of rain -- and week after week I saw bright sunshine, only the faintest spells of a drizzle and certainly no heavy rain, brilliant weekday afternoons walking to Regent's Park to watch the birds ducking in and out of the glistening water of the lake, evenings and daylight parting ways only reluctantly, and much past seven p.m., granting infinite extensions to my days as I pedalled around this wonderful, foreign place... I was new to London, I'd been here six weeks, this was all the London I knew.

But it did happen, and so suddenly, in exactly the ominous way that they all said it would. In those same tones that I've been hearing at every grocery shop, on the bus, at street corners where people stand around blowing cigarette smoke into their hands, it has, all of a sudden, become "a bit chilly out (innit?)". My habituated-to-thirty-seven-degrees-C self at least saw it coming that evening, and with a rare alacrity I immediately found a shop and bought myself a pair of gloves and a skullcap. Since then, for the last few days, the going has been gritty, suiting up and putting on a suitably grim expression as I cycle through the morning wind and chill, past men in their cars peering out at the sky in front of them, and women at bus stops wearing scarves around their head looking solemnly about sizing the day's weather up.

Now, the way people's eyes meet has changed. There are slight, but still perceptible, telling signs: a mutual drawing-in of the shoulders, a pulling-together of the trenchcoat. Passersby study each other's protective clothing in a manner that approaches concern. A woman rubs her hands together as a man walking past gives her a glance of grim sympathy. Almost as if to say, "We're in this together." I'd been rather amused by how much people seemed to talk about the weather here, but it wasn't funny to me anymore. Not when I knew that as you hurry out of the biting chill into the supermarket, when the security guard echoes you with the same intensity when you say, feelingly, "Its fucking cold outside", even if only for that one moment, it actually made me feel better. There is no empathy between complete strangers as reflexively heartfelt as the shared consequences of cold weather.

At five o clock this evening, daylight holding on for its last few minutes before the temperature drop and the darkness take firm hold, I cycled back home in the wind. The evening was early, I was in the enjoyable process of deciding what to do with it, my spirits were up. I turned onto my street from the main road and looked up. Sometime when I wasn't looking, the leaves on the trees have changed colour. I've never lived in a place where this happens, and nothing -- not pretty pictures of faraway places that you set as wallpapers on your computer screen, nor poetic-sounding words you read -- could have prepared me for this. Dramatic yellows and purples and reds and oranges -- and those fiery, fleeting shades in between. I saw some flowers I haven't noticed before. A picture of how my street might look in winter pops into my head, I imagine how fetching it will look, and especially if it snows.

Autumn was a foreign word to me until now, and my first days of autumn have definitely been, as the Romans say, a bit chilly out. But I want to suit up and go to Regent's Park again. Autumn in London is very beautiful.