24:08:2025 Late August
I've really enjoyed actively keeping notes on my experiences this week. My last entry was all kind of done on the Sunday, but this week I've been jotting down ideas all week which has been really fun. And it's helped that this week has felt so prototypically August, like someone decided it should all be concentrated in a 7 day period. Even my annual August insanity - I described it once as being when everything that died in July starts "growing back wrong" - happened almost entirely yesterday in a very weird 24 hours (don't ask to be honest. August insanity stays in August lmao). Thinking about it all in context feels really grounding to me now - as everything starts changing I'm feeling a bit unbalanced and unmoored, but the reliability of the months is grounding me. It's just August, just the transition from summer into autumn. Of course it will be like this.
Apprehension has been a pretty strong feeling this week. It's just that I've become comfortable in summer, really, but as always at the centre of summer is its ephemerality, and I know I couldn't have thrown myself into summer with such force without the knowledge that it would end. The change of autumn has been a little intimidating - I left my uni town early because I found it too painful to stay, and I'm hoping that pain has healed enough for being back there to not sting anymore, but the worry remains. I suppose it's also the social elements of autumn I'm finding intimidating. I've spent a lot of summer alone, and I've really appreciated that space and privacy, but I know there won't be a lot of that in autumn. It helps to know that hand in hand with autumn's vibrancy of social life usually comes a more sociable and outgoing me, or at least a version of myself that can face those social situations when they come and disappear into the woods for some solitude when they leave. I've got a few weeks to adjust, as well - I imagine the first week back won't be too dissimilar to my summer in terms of time spent alone, but I have a couple of friends who will be around, and people will trickle in until the business of fresher's week. It also helps that I know most people already this year. I'm sure I'll get into the swing of it.
To help with preparing psychologically for that change, I've been thinking a lot about autumn, what I want to achieve and what my goals are. Relearning cello is an easy one to start with - I've found out I'll be able to loan one and I'm determined enough that I'll make the time to practice if it kills me - and alongside that comes my general aim to become passionate about learning again. I've spent summer intellectually resting and I do feel in that sense rejuvinated and ready to start learning again, for pleasure as well as for my degree. I've got my autumn journal now, my written counterpart to my summer sketchbook, which I'm hoping will get me thinking and writing and philosophising and research to my heart's content. As well as that, I've been thinking about how my style might change this autumn. I got my new lightweight jacket on Tuesday, which will inevitably become integral to my wardrobe in autumn, and with it I feel like I'm starting to discover autumn's self - what I'll look like, dress like, what I'll be doing. It's always fun to watch yourself changing with the seasons, I think.
The final thing I wanted to talk about: nature, the weather, August in the world. This week has been beautiful - it's been cooler, leaves are falling in places, people are starting to say it feels like autumn - to me this is August at its most August. The tiny stream by the park near my house has dried up; fields are overgrown and blooming with so many flowers; crickets are buzzing, butterflies are fluttering around; there are blackberries everywhere, most of them too sweet for me by now (yes I have been eating insane amounts of blackberries); on Wednesday morning we even got the full force of August's gloom, with misty rain and rolling grey clouds over the fields. I was listening to In Words by Marika Hackman all morning and by the time my afternoon at work had finished the sun was shining low and golden and listening to the slower songs on MARINA's Froot (I've been appreciating Weeds and Solitare especially) felt like the most natural thing in the world. That afternoon, and all week, really, the evening on Friday I spent drinking with my friends, my afternoon wandering around the market in the city yesterday, fixing my bike again, God there are so many things I haven't talked about - anyway, suffice to say, August's mundanity has become beautiful, as it always does.