I don’t have a favourite season. They all have their merits. I don’t mind heat and I like cold weather. Rain doesn’t bother me, although I find gales a bit much. Strong winds always feel rather like a personal attack from Mother Nature. My favourite times are the changing of the seasons: the hawthorn blossom laden hedges and greenery of Spring/Summer, the turning leaves of Autumn and the first frost, and the first balmy days as Winter gives way to Spring. The sense of change and promise is energising, as the natural world offers up an endlessly varied kaleidoscope of sensory experience, such as the arrival of the first screaming swifts, and at time of year, the smoke from bonfires drifting across the cool afternoon air.

It’s mushroom season now, and after a particularly hard summer, pickings are slim, but there are still field mushrooms to be found. They are pretty much the only ones I know how to identify, and one of my regrets from childhood is that I didn’t pay closer attention to our mother, who knows a lot about foraging for them. 

After growing up in a small village in an empty countryside, surrounded by miles and miles of wheat and barley and woodland, we were accustomed to growing seasons too, and time was marked by pea harvesting, combining, and the fruit picking seasons (not to mention the all important Conker Season) as much as the standard seasonal markers. London came as a shock to the system twenty-four years ago. London seasons are, Cold and Grey, Depressingly Grey and Wet, Unpleasantly Humid, Grey and Wet Again, and repeat. A sunny day in London is like a gift, and people lose their minds, walking around with their tops off, getting burnt and leaving their trash everywhere. Yet nature won’t be beaten, from the vines planted on the ruins of a Roman bath house in the City, to the flock of sparrows, the swan couple, and the family of ducks who live in front of the Tate Modern. It never ceases to amaze me that there are pelicans in St James’s Park, although they are more of a waddling fixture than a force of nature. 

The turn of the seasons are, to my mind, far more interesting than high summer or the depths of winter, or even the long golden reign of autumn. They are invigorating and symbolise the changes we all have to make in life. They have a beauty of their own, and they remind me that nature is all around us, wherever we are.