Fall

The leaves are falling. In fact, by the time you read this, they might have already reached the ground.

It's autumn. The season of browns and Halloween. Of parkin and seasonal affective disorder. Of rain and fireworks and kicking a schoolchum's satchel into a wet, mushy heap of tree detritus.

Autumn. Woodsmoke and depression.

Autumn. Fall. Anti-Spring. The Dyening. The grim march to PE. The Early Dark. Winter's seedy step-dad.

Autumn.

The older I get, the more I appreciate the excruciating little things. Like stepping in a scummy puddle. Or a mouse with a chainsaw.

Autumn reminds us that all things must end. Except for the things that don't end. Like Neighbours. Or impermanence.

I remember Bonfire Night or (Pope Conflagration Night as our family called it). You have to remember it. There's that rhyme. The one about that date and how you should remember it. You know that date. "Remember, remember, etc".

All gloves and hot dogs, it were. And terrifying warnings about accidentally burning yourself.

That's autumn to me: terrifying hot dog warnings.

But the seasons are not our enemies. They are our companions. Our contextualisers. Our Contextualiza Doolittles. Like the chiming clock, they keep reminding us who, where and how high we are. Seasons are our compass. Autumn is... West, probably.

I wouldn't want to live on the equator. They don't have the same seasonal patterns. It's wet or dry for them. I wouldn't want that.

I define myself by the four seasons. Baby chick - barbecue - hot dog warning - carrot-nosed whitelump. That's how I remember it.

Wet and dry is nothing. It's not cyclical. It's just two things. You can't have a hot dog warning based on air moisture. You literally need a different barometer.

(For a while, up at the beginning of that last paragraph, I thought the word I was looking for was 'cycular'. Not circular or cyclical - CYCULAR. That's a good word. I will use it once a day from now on.)

So whilst it may seem sad to see what were once fresh green leaves rotting in our gutters and mulch museums, it's really just the reassuring chiming of the clock.

And the chiming lasts forever. Until the planet dies. In about twenty years or so.

***

You wouldn't have thought you could store so much wisdom in such a small brain. But I keep some of it elsewhere. I've made room for wisdom. I don't have any bone marrow. It's all proverbs and life-lessons and Confucius.

Don't worry, I'm going to donate it when I die. Someone dying of wisdom deficiency will inherit all of that epiphanic goo, and it will save them from a life of talking about windscreens and They Think It's All Over.

Carry a Wisdom Donor Card. Seriously. It could change someone's life.

***

I've just had some coffee. So here's the plan. Five minutes to write something here, then I'll call it a day and publish this bitch.

What am I going to write about? I don't know. That's for Mr Coffee Bean to decide.

He's not related to that other Mr Bean. Or Sean Bean. Or Farmer Bean from Fantastic Mr Fox. He's much less incompetent, gruff and lean than those three.

I think (and I'm being prodded by Mr C. Bean here), that humans should evolve blackboard skin and chalk fingers. That's the next big leap in human evolution.

Think of all the stuff you could write on your body! To-do lists, noughts and crosses, humorous slogans. Of course, the tattoo industry would have to adapt. But their artists would still be needed. Not everyone can be great at drawing, even if they were born with chalk fingers.

I know what you're thinking: the chalk would break too easily.

That's true. But perhaps it would only be one finger. And it would regenerate, like a calcite Doctor Who.

("He's not called Dr Who! He's called The Doctor!" says a pedant. Or Doctor Pedant, as I call him.)

I'd like to be able to draw on my body. And you'd get to clean yourself with those fun blackboard erasers. The chalk dust might get a bit much, I suppose. Also, you wouldn't be able to scratch yourself without creating an awful noise.

Maybe we'll lose our ears to compensate.

So, that's it. The next evolutionary leap will be one (or more) chalk fingers, skin like a blackboard and no ears.

That sounds like the premise for an X-Men-like group of superheroes. An advanced new branch of the human race, hated and feared by those whom they try to protect.

It will be a civil rights allegory. But unlike the original X-Men premise using super powers as a metaphor for racial inequality, the Blackboard-Men (we'll come up with a better name later) will use blackboards. Imagine that - someone being judged by the colour of their skin. Raises an interesting point, right?

I think I may have lost my train of thought. And my readership.

Never mind. My five minutes is long gone.

Keep fighting the good fight.