Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness...

If I were allowed only one line of poetry to keep safely in my memory, I think it would be that. My slight touch of synaesthesia can taste and smell those wonderful words as I roll them around my brain like a fine wine. And yet every year I manage to be surprised by just how much I love this time of year - however much I remind myself, in Spring and Summer I always doubt my love of Autumn. And then September arrives, with its air of having just got in from some very enjoyable show; late and a little tired, but full of excitement still.

How much my life has changed in a few short years! I've moved so far from the feelings of desperation and being trapped in the wrong job. I'm not quite sure I'm in the right place yet, but I'm so much nearer than I was. My daughters are both settled in their new countries, I've enjoyed travelling and feeling Truly Alive again, and now Autumn is here to remind me that there is an energy in growing old which isn't available to Spring. There is a way to grow older whilst retaining a love of life, an exhuberance, even an embracing of what is to come, because at least it's new and different and therefore exciting.

I've been very fortunate to have some great role models of older people. I knew a woman of 107, and remember my Mother coming in laughing because she'd just met the son, who was grumbling about how he'd had no sympathy from her when he had pleaded Arthritis as his excuse for not digging her garden. "Yer nobbut a lad!" was her scathing comment. He was 83 at the time.

When I was a little girl of 6, my best friend was 63. We spent time together most days, I was an honorary OAP and went sketching, walking and swimming with her and her friends. She saved my life really - I got the warmth from her which was lacking at home. She in turn had been The One Who Stayed At Home, looking after both parents until Mother died at 90. She had a very close friendship with one woman, and looking back I think it's very likely she was a lesbian (even as a child I thought she was manly) but I have no idea whether they would ever have sought anything more than intense friendship. I remember well her disparaging remarks about men and her wonderful example of embracing life and it just being a bally nuisance if your legs got stiff, but not to pay any attention. She was my best friend until I was a teenager. I realise now that perhaps I also gave her something emotionally. I'm immensely grateful for having known her.

So - Autumn as metaphor. Too obvious to comment on. Many people have written about it far better than I ever could. What interests me this year is that, way back in late Spring, I found myself dreading Winter.

To put this into context, I've always loved Winter. In Yorkshire we really did have those deep drifts of snow of which people speak nostalgically. I used to sit at the window and watch the snow falling at night, each flake visible in the light of the lamp outside our house. I would choose one way, way up in the air and watch it weave its way down amongst thousands of its brothers and sisters, feeling special that I was the only person in the whole world watching that particular one and seeing its journey's end.

Last year, however, snow took on a different meaning for me. I was still recovering from knee surgery and my estate was swamped by so much snow that the cars were visible only as the white shapes of beetles on what used to be the road. It snowed, and snowed, and snowed. My daughters were really peeved to miss this re-run of the winters I'd told them about from my childhood. Buses disappeared for over two weeks. It took fifteen minutes to walk to the corner shop some 300 metres away. I feared for the elderly couple across the road and battled out every other day to buy them food.

For the first week it was amazing. It really was like travelling back to the past. And then as we went into a second, and then a third week of the snow, and I couldn't leave the house without it falling inside my wellies, I began to feel this irrational fear that it was never going to stop. We had had a huge flood a few years earlier (not my local area thank goodness) which had shaken our confidence in the weather. Now it looked increasingly as though I was never going to be able to drive again.

I realise now that something was damaged inside me last winter. This year I have been dreading it. I don't like feeling this way, and I'm reminding myself of all the wonderful things about the dark and snow, the warmth of the lights in shops and houses, the buzz of shoppers and the cameraderie you feel when you finally sit in a cafe and peel off your coat, and catch other shoppers' eyes.

Perhaps there is a deeper resonance here. Maybe it's not the season I dread, but the symbolism. There has been so much talk the last few years of disaster coming at us from all directions, perhaps in some way I equate it with that bad winter.

So today I'm making a choice. I am going to enjoy next winter, whatever it brings, even if it's just the challenge of enjoying it! I always hate to feel cut off from my beloved Peak District - so this year I shall find ways of getting there anyway. I'll force myself out in the cold to walk through the crisp air, and I shan't worry in case my knee (fine now) lets me down. It won't. I'm going to rediscover that childhood joy of breathing in pure, cold air, hearing the silence behind the muffled traffic, watching snowflakes dancing and knowing that Spring cannot be far behind...