How to Autumn
The first rule of autumn club is to talk about autumn club a lot. Like the flight of Santa’s Sleigh in the film Elf, autumn lives or dies on good cheer. It feeds on your cross-platform cosiness, thrives on your passionate defence of the pumpkin spice latte. Every time someone rhapsodises about boots and jumpers or crumble with custard, it gets bigger and stronger. Neglect to do this, however, and autumn collapses. The magic dissipates and we realise our hero has just been a heap of sodden dead leaves all along.
So, rejoice! Talk about it! Post about it! Turn yourself into a one-woman PR agency with a single, needy client: autumn. Is there a nice thing you can tenuously attribute to autumn? Are you wearing tights for the first time in four months? Is there some good telly on? Could you be chilly enough for a blanket, or a bath? Go for it, don’t hold back! Go on a walk to nowhere, and tell everyone how nice it was. Whimsically pick a blackberry off a bush, and spit it out when it tastes faintly of dog wee.
But of course, autumn isn’t simply a load of hot (cold) air. True autumning is an art form, and like many of the great disciplines it is all about balance. For example, currently we are in the jumper-no-coat days. Unless it is raining, in which case we’re in the coat-no-jumper days. Sweat is the single biggest threat to autumn smugness, so layer at your peril. You may still be carrying some residual heat from summer, in which case the best way to release it is by leaving your legs bare until the last possible moment, or sticking your head out of the window on the Northern Line.
Get a scarf out. Yes, already. Most sacred of all fleeting autumn phases is the narrow window of time in which you can wear a scarf over a lightweight sweater but WITHOUT a coat, which is the most nonchalant outfit in the world. Your scarf, fluttering lightly in the breeze. Your limbs snug but unencumbered. Only really permissible for about five days a year, it’s the sartorial equivalent of wild garlic season or catching the golden snitch. Better move fast and relish it while you can because UH-OH TOO LATE, IT’S GONE.
As well as enjoying the shiny newness of stuff, good autumning also means enjoying the shiny newness and crinkly oldness of nature. Buy some gourds. Arrange them in a line. Cup the gourds lightly in your hands, and hold them against your cheek. Spend an afternoon drinking tea and flicking through recipe books to find something lovely to do with the gourds. Make a mental note to buy some seasonal mushrooms and truffle oil. Let the gourds wither on your windowsill like tiny shrunken heads. Throw the gourds away, you don’t need them anymore.
Autumning isn’t just about stuff, though. Obviously the stuff is important, but without the correct mindset the stuff becomes exactly that: just stuff. Without first adjusting your attitude (the ideal attitude is one of optimistic self-renewal tinged with wistful introspection) you’re really just a woman watching Gilmore Girls in hiking socks with bits of Jus-Roll cinnamon bun stuck in her hair. You need resolutions!
You might not know this but September resolutions are a better class of resolution than new year’s resolutions (which some autumning advocates think of as ‘the basic bitch resolutions’) because they’re more about nurturing your spiritual self and less about reversing the evidence that you’ve been putting Bailey’s in your coffee for a month and calling it “special milk”. The great thing about them is that they don’t have to be quantified or monitored; you don’t even really need to decide what they are, because there is no end goal except inner happiness, and outer cosiness. And inner cosiness. And looking really good in rich, jewel tones.
Here’s the wonderful secret: if you’re even thinking about wanting to autumn, then congrats, you are already autumning! Keep it up. Don’t let that momentum die. Put nutmeg on something. Cancel some plans. Put one foot in front of the other. Kick up some crisp brown leaves, and then instagram yourself kicking up the leaves and post it with the autumn leaves emoji. Go through some old photos of Septembers past, like the ones where you started school and started uni and moved into old houseshares, and play the songs you played back then and have a little, autumnal cry.
Then SNAP OUT OF IT, because it’ll be Christmas in about half an hour and you haven’t held a sparkler or baked a pie yet. Autumn needs you. Don’t let autumn down.
This essay was originally published in the email newsletter Schmancy!, by Lauren Bravo and Daisy Buchanan. Sign up here.
