OCTOBER has been late this year. It occupied its usual place on the calendar, of course, but an unseasonally-warm start to autumn meant it didn’t feel properly Octoberish at all for quite a while.

I am an autumn creature, I relish kicking my boots in piles of fallen leaves, watching the clouds skudding across a pale blue sky, driven by distant winds. I like the early fall of night, pregnant with promise and magic. I anticipate the Halloween monsters that roam the streets, questing for treats and sweets. I sniff the air delightedly when there is woodsmoke and the drifting traces of gunpowder on the cold breeze.

My daughter is an autumn person, like me. We are both winter babies, her December, me January, and find the dark homely and agreeable.

My wife and our son are both spring-born, her in April, him in June, and they favour the kiss of the sun on their bare arms and the shafts of bright yellow light that pole in through the windows from early morning.

But October was late in coming this year. Walking to school in relative warmth, her coat held in her hands rather than zipped up to her chin, our daughter bemoaned the fine weather.

“I like it cold,” she insisted. “It’s too warm for autumn.”

But despite October’s tardiness and the sight of people still clinging on to their shorts and T-shirts, autumn is here nonetheless, and the leaves have given up their tenuous grasp on the branches of trees, and are falling.

We are all looking forward to Halloween, like never before. There is jelly to be made, green, with eyeballs suspended in it. The decorations are slumbering in the loft. There are costumes to design. It’s the start of the death of the year, but I’ve never felt more alive.