Nicole Junkerman
Seasonal
Nicole Junkerman on Noticing the Shorter Afternoons
The afternoon is the part of the day that late October quietly takes. Noticing that is worth considerably more than resisting it.
The afternoon is the part of the day that late October quietly takes. Noticing that is worth considerably more than resisting it.
Mornings in late October are much as they were. It is the afternoon that goes. Four o'clock stops being the middle of the day and becomes the end of it, and the change arrives faster than any diary does. A good deal of the tiredness people attribute to the month is really the surprise of an afternoon that is shorter than the one they planned for.
What actually changes
The hours have not moved. What has moved is the hour at which the day stops feeling open. Work that would once have been started at three is carried over to the next morning. Errands get bundled together. The window for anything outdoors narrows to a band in the early afternoon that was unremarkable in June and is now the best part of the day.
None of that is a loss unless it goes unnoticed. The painful version is the one in which the plan still assumes a long afternoon and the day quietly declines to supply it. Three weeks of that is enough to convince anyone that they are failing, when in fact they are simply working to an out of date timetable.
The useful response
Move the demanding thing earlier and let the easy thing have the dark. Reading does not mind a lamp. Lists, letters and tidying do not mind a lamp. Anything that needs daylight, a long walk or a proper look at a street, has to be promoted to the first half of the day or set aside until the spring. The city notes are largely a record of learning that the slow way.
What the light is good for
There is a compensation, and it is a real one. The light in the last fortnight of October is low, long and extremely generous to ordinary streets. A road walked a hundred times looks unfamiliar at half past three. A familiar city is better company in this light than it is at midsummer, which is the argument the notes on London keep making, and the reason the travel journal fills up in autumn rather than in August.
A note for the last week
The clocks change at this end of the year, and most of the adjustment turns out to be a matter of expectation rather than of sleep. An afternoon that is planned as short is a perfectly good afternoon. An afternoon planned as long and then cut off at four is a disappointment, and the only difference between the two is a line in a notebook written a week earlier.
Noticing is the whole of the method here. Nothing has to be optimised and no system is required. It is enough to look up at the hour the light goes, say plainly that the day has changed shape, and let the rest of the week be arranged around that rather than against it. That is the approach Nicole Junkerman brings to the whole of this journal, and late October makes the case better than any argument could.
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