The nights are cold now, and they are longer, but the shortness of the days is offset by their beauty. The hedgerows are losing their leaves with the reluctance of children undressing in a cold bedroom, and around them the great broadleaf trees are touring the colours of the rainbow before going naked for the season which becomes us best: winter.
Summer in this country is a fraud; it is an annual perjury, made grievous by our witless innocence as we buy our suncream and charcoal. We should yearly curse our infernal, eternal stupidity, and not the summer weather, which is what it is - fickle, drab, cloudy and bleak. Yet we have been compensated most gloriously this year by a quite wondrous autumn; perhaps it is simply that it is my first autumn in the country, but I don't think so. Splendid day has followed splendid day. Blackberries, the hedgerow pearls, are normally uneatable at this time of year, their sugar content low because of the poor sunshine, though the tradition has it that they have lost their flavour because the devil has pissed on them. This year, Lucifer has kept his bladder under control; or maybe it is just that the autumn sunlight has been so strong that the blackberries are now, finally, when they should be past their prime, actually at their best. The berries of mid to late summer, normally delicious, were wan things, tasteless and unripe; but this October, the brambles are laden with juicy fruit, and crab apples, elderberries and sloes have reached a late but plump harvest.
Crab apple jelly
You can make a lovely jelly from the sap of boiled crab apples - perfect with pork - and of course you can drink the juice of sloes, but only after a year's immersion in gin, to celebrate the last Christmas of the 1990s. I have never heard of elder-gin, but this most glorious of autumns I will make some, and taste it in a year's time, and then maybe fall down dead.
It might well be one of those etymological coincidences that the two Latin words, Hibernia for Ireland and hibernus for wintry, are so close; or on the other hand, the ancient Romans, knowing a thing or two, might well have allowed one word to be influenced by the other. Few places must have seemed more abominable to the Latinate spirit than than that wet island on the edge of the known world in winter. They even came here, messed around for a while in Kildare, and then fled. Even parts of Scotland seemed superior to Ireland in winter.
Leafless trees
They are an intelligent people, the Italians, but they have their off-days. Ireland is at its best in winter, when every fine morning brings a fresh surprise and the flat sunlight illuminating the black shiny bark of leafless trees creates a landscape of bewilderingly beautiful sculptures. Freed of most of their summertime duties of work, country people are able to relax in the winter and engage in the sports Italians would pay fortunes to be able to enjoy over such vast, uncrowded spaces.
The swallows are gone, of course - though I saw one unfortunate last weekend: doomed, doomed - and our skies are now filled with wheeling mobs of jackdaws, rooks and crows. Few things are as evocative as the gathering of corbines at nightfall, their plaintive, beckoning voices ringing out through the dusk as they communely seek a roost. Thrushes forage in large mobs through the winter grasslands, and if we are lucky soon they will be joined by redwings and fieldfares from Scandinavia, proof that winter has arrived there.
Winter officially begins here when the clocks change, on the closest Saturday to October 21st, two months short of the mid-winter solstice, though they return to summertime a full three months after the solstice. Why this should be so is one of the mysteries the British astronomer royal might be able to explain to me; nobody else can. Nor can anyone else explain why we so slavishly follow English clocks: we did not when we were part of the United Kingdom yet we do today, though there can be no logical reason why Donegal should dance to the time set in Greenwich, 700 miles to the southwest.
Our true season
Now there are moves in Britain to create two time zones there, simply because the chronological needs of Dover are not the same as those of Orkney. Are we going to have to wait, once again, for the British to take the initiative on something before we, once again, ape their ways?
No matter what the clocks may say, now we are moving towards our true season, the season to which our cuisine and our habits and our clothing incline us. Summertime is a heresy, the false prophet of a deluding schism which invariably leads us into a forlorn and godless wilderness, from which we escape with relief, sadder but seldom wiser. Forget summer. Ahead lie the wet and blustery glories of winter: wildly wagging gundog tails disappearing into the brake and horses' rearquarters vanishing over tall, uncropped hedgerows; buttery scones and hot whiskeys; squirrels skittering through trees; and always, always, from winter's first day, the tiny buds of the coming spring. Rejoice: hibernamus in Hiberniae.