When September came

On Sunday I was reminded it would be September the next day. I cried. It was quite surprising; I hadn’t expected to do that and it seems strange now that it happened.

I was visiting my friends Hannah and Sameer. As they asked me what was wrong I tried to laugh as I said, “I don’t want it to be September.” But because I was already crying it just looked like I was crying more.

Earlier that day Hannah has devised the Amélie Poulain game. We had to list our likes in the way Amélie does at the start of the film. Hannah liked it when bus drivers wave at each other. I liked little footpaths that join streets together. We continued: getting into a hot bath; waking in the morning and knowing that you can go back to sleep again; conkers; discovering new drinks; caterpillars.

I was toying with ‘enjoying a really good book’ when Hannah turned things round. “I hate coming to the end of a really good book,” she said very seriously and crossly.

I remembered that Roland Barthes likened our tendency to race to the end of a book and then wish we were still reading it, to the way we live our lives: wishing them on to the next stage and the next only to wish we had them over again.

It seems to me there are other comparable pleasurable acts: sex for one. Food can also be like this. And holidays: we keep waiting for the next pleasurable activity and the next on holiday and are then sorry that we have to go home. And there have been times when I’ve questioned looking forward to my family coming to visit because I’m aware that I’ll have to say goodbye again at the end. And music can be like this for me: I want to hear a certain piece and then am sorry when it finishes and I want to hear it again. These things do not all fit easily into one category but there is something that links them in my mind.

I told Hannah that my favourite thing in the world was Saturday morning in bed with a lover (not just any, but someone you’re very close to): that little world beneath the duvet that’s just the two of you. I think one of the reasons that this is my favourite is because it has no fixed end.

We see this distinction of endlessness in some of the other little pleasures that Hannah and I picked as our favourite things. We picked objects rather than activities: Conkers, Footpaths, Seeing bus drivers wave… or we picked moments: it was the moment of getting in the hot bath rather than the activity of taking the bath; and it was the discovery of a new drink, not the drinking.

We cannot stop the passing of time. We cannot choose when one month becomes another. But September came and turned out to be better than August. Best not fight it.