Druin Burch

Grey rain slants down over the brown heather of the Lochaber hills, falling relentlessly into Loch Linnhe, and drenching the Caledonian Sleeper idling beneath my window on the platform at Fort William. November is technically still autumn, but already the long evenings of British Summer Time seem to belong to a different world. Pleasant as it is to wrap up in a coat, to feel invigorated by stepping out into a chill, or delighted by returning to the warmth within, the dying year is no cause for celebration. Christmas, the adopted pagan festival, is like Halloween – not put there because the days are joyous, but so we can thumb our nose at the downcast season. Defiance is the right attitude.

My late son took film seriously, a taste I was delighted to see him develop, and regret not being able to see him grow out of. When he was little we watched the Pixar films, and they gave us great joy. The first 20 minutes of Up and the last 20 of Toy Story 3 have been called the only perfect bits of cinema, a formulation with a high quotient of truth. After our son’s death, my wife commented that she had never before seen me cry. I had always wondered if she’d spotted my tears at the end of Coco, or those I shed during Guardians of the Galaxy 3, during a Sicilian family holiday, but I don’t cry easily. We watched Coco, which is about remembering the dead, shortly after my mother’s funeral. In Sicily, I wonder if it was a reaction to being uncomplicatedly happy.

Our economy is stagnating, our borders and our welfare state flung open to those who despise us. We once threw railway lines around the world and now struggle to build one to Birmingham. Free speech is under threat, and it’s almost impossible to get hold of a decent lettuce. I do not mean to be too gloomy. I hate those who think themselves virtuous for always looking on the glum side of life. I accept there is much to celebrate. We live longer and healthier lives. Children rarely die. People can read and books are cheap. In the veg aisle of the little Sainsbury’s Local on the new housing estate you find tarragon and pak choi and sourdough, and tomatoes raised somewhere better than Holland.

My quince tree thrives – proof that nature can overcome adversity. I planted it, and I am a bad gardener. Childhood hours spent waiting for my mother to finish watching Gardeners’ World left me with fond memories of Percy Thrower, but in place of horticultural skill I inherited indolent incompetence. Our garden did not seem so big when we moved from a flat a decade ago. But for most of the second half of the 20th century, the former occupant of our house had been a keen gardener. Carefully planted beds, it turns out, need care, which I have failed to provide. Each spring I wage a blood feud with ground elder, to the point where I hallucinate its leaves.

Long Compton is in the Cotswolds, but to the east, where there are no boutique hotels or shops selling artisan candles to tourists. Banburyshire and its surrounds are actual countryside. Fields roll away in the manner Germans call Kulturlandschaft, meaning landscape shaped by centuries of human care. This is the sort of country that makes people write poetry about hedgerows and choral music about sheep: lovely to live in but, by long British tradition, a dismal place to dine out. Discovering a truly great restaurant in Long Compton – population 764 – feels like finding in rural Warwickshire one of those bucolic la France profonde dining experiences that seemed nostalgic fantasies even when M.F.K Fisher described them.

As I write, a copy of The Hallmarked Man sits beside me. Not being on holiday, spending the morning reading a new detective novel would seem as louche as a pre-brunch martini. Not being David Niven, I’m making the book wait until at least after lunch. J.K. Rowling’s new book, under her pen name of Robert Galbraith, comes in at around 900 pages. I expect to rip through it smartly. I am not an ideal reader of detective fiction, nor the thrillers and mysteries that have a whodunit at the core of their tightly planned plots. My ability to figure out the murderer – even my interest in trying – is vestigial.

Gardens are past their best, large spiders are appearing indoors, chill mornings herald coming mists, the days are not so long, and adverts have replaced barbecues with ‘back to school’ offers. Elderberries have turned a purple that fades into black, and soon will drop and stain the ground. The daily commute remains relatively quiet for another few days but summer, and the summer holidays, are coming to an end. For many of us, September feels more like a new year than January, long after our days of school and study. The cold days of January are much like each other; but at the end of August there is a palpable sense of change. Excitement and melancholy marry. Which one dominates probably depends on how happy you were at school or university.

As a good left-wing lad raised by Guardian-reading parents who didn’t drive, I knew Jeremy Clarkson was tasteless and unpleasant. In my first year as a junior doctor, my surgical ward had one of his articles pinned to the office wall. It was off-putting to see his shabby name and a piece from a tabloid, but one day I read it all the same. As I recall, he’d had some minor scrape and written a column mocking the paramedics who showed up to help. He didn’t want two tinkerers who weren’t medically trained, he sneered. No, he wanted Michael Schumacher to drive him to hospital and a supermodel, sitting scantily clad in the back of the ambulance, giving him the will to live until he arrived.