WHAT YOU'VE BEEN DOING
You have been buying autumn from the seasonal aisle.
Every year it starts sooner. The supermarket builds an aisle where three gourds and a pumpkin-shaped mug try to form a lifestyle, and you buy in: the mug, the plug-in refill promising a hearth that delivers a biscuit losing an argument with a radiator. For a fortnight the room smells of a spice you've never met. Then it runs dry, and you buy another.
You buy autumn from a shelf each year, when it turns up outside, on time, for nothing.
