Season of Pissed and Yellow Fearfulness

It's the last day of August today, and there's a distinctly autumnal feel in the air. Actually, there has been a distinctly autumnal feel in the air since June, and I blame this on all the optimists who spread the rumour that 2011 was going to be - like all the others since 1976 - a real scorcher.

So, as well as preparing myself for the predictably changing world outside by pulling out the woolly jumpers and long-johns, I am also bracing myself for the inevitable (if beautiful) photographic posts of all the russet-hued woodland stretching from the south coast of the UK to the northern wastes of Canada that will surely be turning blogland into every shade of red and yellow in the coming weeks.

When I was a kid, many of the fashionable, 'greasy-spoon' cafes were wall-papered with giant, blown-up photos of Canadian woodland in the Fall, and sitting in them with a nasty cup of Nescafe and a round of 'Mother's Pride' toast was like being in Northern Ontario Land, nomatter what the season. Some of the wrap-around pictures were set on the edge of a lake, and the lakes often had small canoes moored in the middle-distance, which went some way to counteracting the sense of isolation if you were the only customer in the cafe.

There must have been some sort of salesman who went around all the cheap cafes in Britain with van-loads of these printed photos, selling them to all the Greek and Italian owners who dutifully pasted them up on the walls. These days, if you have a big enough printer, you can make these images yourself, so they are not so glamorously unattainable - come to think of it, you can just hop on a plane and find yourself surrounded by the real thing these days. When I was in Canada, about one in ten of the residents seemed to be British ex-pats anyway. I wonder if they had been mortally influenced by those cafe posters when they were young?

I cannot think of a Christian festival set in the Autumn, which is just as well - I think that 20 or 30 cards of falling leaves on my mantelpiece would begin to pall after a few seasons, not that I have that many friends who send me cards, even at Christmas.

The Pagans had the right idea - they used to set fire to everything in the autumn, which is where the quaint tradition of bonfires came from, I believe. They still do this in Ottery St Mary, Devon, and I once put up a post on it, saying that it was the most terrifying experience of my life when I went to it one (and one only) year.

Here in Bath - and I believe most of 'civilised' Britain - the authorities have actually banned bonfires, so we have been denied the simple, seasonal pleasure of the smell of burning leaves once or twice a year. They have found yet another way of criminalising ordinary citizens by making it illegal to do what has been done for hundreds - if not thousands - of years. You have to be careful of these 'green' politicians. Their criteria of social values become highly fascistic if actually put into the statutes. Let's hope they turn red when their season has come to an end, and that they fall off and rot.

Meanwhile, I think I might open a cafe here which has giant pictures of forrest fires running all around the walls. I wonder what sort of customers that might attract? Maybe not.