Boiled frog fall

Autumn Pinterest boards on hot summer days

everything I aspire to be

The girls in the city are wearing short shorts and wool coats. They’re wearing knee boots and sundresses, flip flops and leather jackets, huge scarves and little skirts. Nobody knows how to dress for the weather these days.

London isn’t designed for the heat. As soon as it hits thirty degrees, everybody flocks to the parks to lie down on parched grass and drink out of tins. In June, though, it was so hot that even the parks were empty. I made plans on a Friday night to go out with my boyfriend and his sister and her partner, and when we arrived at our usually crowded bar, there was barely anyone around. We ordered Aperol spritzes and sat outside despite the heat, sticky thighs on a wooden bench. There’s something deeply English about trying to make the most of the weather.

That was the first heatwave of the hottest summer on record in the UK. As summers go, it was a strange one. The government decided to start running the country like a nightclub – one in, one out! – and suddenly everybody was smoking again. London was filled with men in Oasis t-shirts and women with grubby little dolls hanging off their handbags. There was a brief craze for volleyball. I spent my afternoons indoors, windows open, listening to the click click click of hijacked Lime bikes go by, and in the evenings I perfected the art of positioning a fan on a chair next to my bed so that I could lie around in my underwear without breaking into a sweat.

Persistent warmth, it turns out, is just as unbearable as scorching heat. The highest temperature recorded in the UK this summer was 35.8 degrees Celsius, which probably sounds insanely minor to anybody who lives close to the equator. Still, it was hot enough to dry up reservoirs and turn the ground to dust. Blackberries shrivelled up on hedges before they could ripen. An American billionaire hired tankers to steal water from a neighbouring county in order to fill up his lake. At a concert in Victoria Park, there was so much dried-up dirt in the air that I spent the whole bus ride home coughing up black phlegm.

Slow, steady heat. Do you know that old story about frogs in hot water? If you put a frog in a pan of boiling water, it will jump out immediately. But if you put it in cold water and gradually raise the temperature, the frog will stay in the pan until it’s boiled to death.

It was still warm when September rolled around, but it was September, so we had to do September things. Pumpkin spice lattes, cinnamon buns, scented candles, burgandy lipstick, long socks. Autumn is always the same. It’s my favourite season, most of the time. I love the light closing in and the jolt of cold air. I love winding down. I love repeating the small things that I do every year. I love feeling like a child.

In the imaginary world of the internet, the seasons always run on time. You can make your fall Pinterest board even when it’s warm outside while you listen to YouTube videos with titles like ‘it’s 1950s vintage autumn with soft oldies music playing in another room for unwind, sleep, study’ and ‘pov: you are walking the streets of Edinburgh - ultimate autumn playlist’. On Substack, articles about how to have your Very Best Autumn started appearing at the end of August. Images of Meryl Streep, Rory Gilmore, and Meg Ryan get shared over and over again. Time to rewatch Twilight!

It makes sense that online culture fetishises the fall. Cute lifestyle content is run, for the most part, by introverted women with good taste. These are people who enjoy a cosy night in, and isn’t that what autumn’s all about? Plus, you can almost romanticise doomscrolling if you do it on a dark, rainy night surrounded by candles in your gingham print pyjamas. But beyond the blog posts, the fetish has also seeped into the consumer world. You can buy a seasonal drink (Apple Butter Matcha at Blank Street; Pecan Crunch Oatmilk Latte at Starbucks), a fall-flavoured lip balm (the Laneige Pumpkin Pie Lip Sleeping Mask; the NATURIUM Phyto-Glow Lip Balm in SPICE; the Gisou Honey Infused Lip Oil in Sticky Toffee), or an autumnal soap (Dove Cinnamon Pumpkin Pie body wash; Lush Harvest Moon shower gel). Walk around London in September and you’ll see shops decked out in orange flowers and cafes strung with fake leaves. Carluccio’s had a mushroom-themed display. Everywhere you go, you can buy into the seasonal spirit.

Part of me wants to be cynical about the commercialisation of the seasons. Buy plastic pumpkins, then a plastic tree, and when spring comes around you can put out plastic flowers with a no-rot guarantee. It’s a warped, worrying symptom of hyper-consumerism. Wherever there’s a trend, there’s a brand hoping to cash in, and seasonal cycles are the perfect capitalist plot: every couple of months, you can sell people something new. Throw in the scarcity tactic of ‘limited edition’ and you’ll be set to sell out. But amid the cash grab, I think seasonal aesthetics speak to something deeper than passing fads. I made a Pinterest board in 2016 called A U T U M N. Edgy title, I know. It’s filled with images tinted with that super-saturated VSCO filter that drove teenagers crazy in the mid-2010s, which makes them look a little dated now, but other than that, I can imagine a kid pining after these pictures today: fallen leaves, chunky knits, and hot chocolate. Why do we keep returning to this same imagery, year after year? What was I chasing in 2016 that still feels covetable today?

Despite all the autumn moodboards, we live less seasonally than ever. The summer’s heatwave made me a bit sweaty, but it didn’t threaten my livelihood. According to the National Farmers Union, the resulting drought led to a ‘significant reduction’ in some crop yields this year, but that won’t have any material impact on me, other than a brief annoyance that Tesco is out of stock of broccoli. I’m not directly dependent on the land. Half of my food comes from different climates. I get up with my alarm clock, not the sun. And now, into November, as the afternoons get darker, I can still be productive: I have lightbulbs.

Instead, I live out the seasons through a series of symbols, the semblance of a life that relies on the weather. Even as modern life has insulated us from cyclical living, I still find myself searching out rituals and images to mark the changing months. Ever since the clocks went back, I’ve been taking myself on 4pm walks with miserable indie music blasting through my earphones, kicking up all the leaves on my street. I made cinnamon buns on my day off, and I might even buy that Lush special edition soap. Rather than see these as superficial acts, I find them reassuring. Something in my animal brain flares up when I see candlelight on a pitch-black afternoon. We’re just blobs on a rock that circles the sun, after all.

As the real-world seasons grow stranger and stranger, maybe we’ll find ourselves clinging to these aesthetics and emblems even more. It was the warmest Bonfire night on record in the UK and I found myself cooking dinner with the balcony door open as distant fireworks illuminated the high-rises. The hollowing out of seasonal living into something shiny and sellable isn’t evidence of overconsumption gone awry, but rather a culture in crisis clinging on to the approximation of something that makes them feel like the world is okay.

Yesterday was the first properly cold day in November. I’m hoping, perversely, that the roses still in bloom on my street will soon die in the frost. The Christmas lights are already up and tomorrow I’m going to take a walk around them. Maybe I’ll buy a hot drink. Try to feel primaeval. Try to watch the setting sun. I want to feel the chill and remember to jump out of the boiling pan of water.