The Last of the Sun

There is a particular evening, somewhere in the second half of September, that you only recognise in retrospect. It begins like all the others before it. You carry the plates outside because you have carried the plates outside all summer, without thinking, because that is simply where dinner happens now. The light is doing its late-September thing — long, low, and the colour of weak honey — and for the first twenty minutes everything is exactly as it has been since June. You are in shirtsleeves. There is a tomato on the plate. The year is holding.

And then, somewhere between the first course and the second, the cold arrives.

It is not dramatic. It is just that at some point you notice the warmth has gone out of the air, that the gold has drained from the light and left it grey, that the person across the table has folded their arms in a way they were not folding them ten minutes ago. Someone says, with the false brightness of a person who does not want to be the one to break it, "Shall we…?" and nods vaguely at the house. And you gather the plates, a little quicker than usual, and carry them inside, and close the door — and only later, doing the washing up, do you realise that was probably the last one. The last dinner outside. The summer's final meal in the open air, eaten without any ceremony, without anyone announcing it, without your even knowing at the time that it was the last.

I always mean to notice it while it is happening. I never do. I am, every single year, too busy eating the tomato.

The reason this evening falls where it does is that we have arrived at the hinge of the whole year — the autumn equinox, the moment the sun crosses the celestial equator heading south and the nights, having been the junior partner since March, take over the running of things. From here to the depths of December, the dark wins a little more every day. The word itself is lovely and ancient: equinox, from the Latin aequus, equal, and nox, night. The equal night. The day when light and dark are supposed to stand in perfect balance before the scales tip toward winter.

Except — and I say this with the joy of a man who has always enjoyed a good technicality — the equinox is a small lie.

Day and night are not actually equal on the equinox. Not quite. If you go and look up the sunrise and sunset times for the day of the equinox, you will find, to your mild indignation, that the day is still several minutes longer than the night. The sun has not read the memo. This happens for two reasons, both of them faintly magical. The first is that the sun is not a point but a disc, and we count the day as beginning the instant its top edge clears the horizon and ending only when its last sliver disappears — so we are given a few free minutes at each end, courtesy of the sun's own width. The second is that the atmosphere bends light, like a lens, so that when the sun is sitting right on the horizon it is in fact already just below it — we are seeing it after it has technically set and before it has technically risen, a mirage of extra daylight thrown in for nothing.

The genuine day of equal day and night — the moment the word equinox actually describes — comes a few days later, and it has its own, much less famous name: the equilux. Equal light. Nobody celebrates the equilux. Nobody has ever heard of the equilux. It does the one job the equinox merely claims to do, and it gets no credit whatsoever, which strikes me as one of the small quiet injustices of the calendar. But back to the table.

What the turning of the year does to the food is more interesting than what it does to the daylight, and it happens on the market stall before it happens anywhere else. For one strange week or two, the two seasons sit side by side on the same trestle. The last tomatoes are still there — but they have changed. They come in paler now, and firmer, and cold to the touch in a way that August tomatoes never were, because the nights have got into them. They have lost the thing that made them worth eating raw. Eaten in a salad they taste faintly of disappointment, of a party that is over.

But right next to them, on the same stall, something new has appeared: the first squash. Fat, dense, patient, orange things that were not there a fortnight ago, that keep for months, that ask to be roasted. The first proper pumpkins. And this is the real signal of the turn — not the tomato's departure but the squash's arrival, the moment the summer fruit that wants only to be sliced and salted gives way to the winter vegetable that demands an hour in a hot oven before it will give you anything at all.

The clever cook does not mourn the tomato. The clever cook fries it green, or roasts it long and slow until the cold-weakened flesh concentrates back into something worth having, or cooks the last of the crop down into the final chutney of the year — the one you will open at Christmas, a little taste of a September evening rescued from the frost. This is the deeper rhythm underneath all of it: the entire logic of cooking flips. All summer we ate to cool down — everything raw, cold, quick, sharp, eaten outside to catch the breeze. Now, without quite deciding to, we begin to eat to warm up. The grill goes cold and the oven comes on, and the first time it does you notice you have lit it as much for the warmth of the kitchen as for the dinner. The window steams up for the first time since spring. Someone makes the first soup, and everyone falls on it as though soup had just been invented.

Even the fruit changes its terms. All summer I have chased fruit you eat on the spot — the apricot warm off the tree, the fig split with a thumb, the cherry eaten by the handful, none of them willing to wait or travel or be improved. And now, arriving just as those vanish, comes the quince: hard as a cricket ball, sour and astringent and completely inedible raw, a fruit that gives you nothing at all unless you are prepared to cook it long and slow and turn it into something else entirely. It is the anti-summer fruit. It is autumn's whole attitude in a single knobbly package: nothing quick, nothing raw, nothing for free — but real rewards for anyone willing to be patient and turn the oven on.

It is not, I should say, only a British or an Italian melancholy — this instinct to mark the end of the outdoor season with one last gathering runs right across the northern half of the continent, and always has. This is harvest-festival time, the deep old European season of Erntedank and Harvest Home and the last of the sagre, when communities that have spent months bringing the crop in stop to eat a great deal of it at once, in the last decent weather, before the doors close for winter. In the older calendar of northern Europe the marker was Michaelmas, the feast of St Michael at the end of September, traditionally the day you ate the goose — a well-fattened autumn bird, the first proper roast of the darkening year, eaten as the nights drew in and the outdoor season formally shut up shop. The first chestnuts appear around the same time, the earliest of the roasting-on-a-brazier foods that will see the cities of Europe through to Christmas. Everywhere at this latitude, the same instinct: gather, cook something warm, eat it together, and acknowledge — with a feast rather than a sigh — that the sun is going.

And over all of it, in these weeks, hangs the Harvest Moon: the full moon that falls nearest the equinox, and the only moon named not for a month but for a job. It earned its name honestly. Because of the shallow angle the moon's path makes with the horizon at this time of year, it rises for several nights running with almost no delay from one evening to the next — a run of bright, early moonlit nights, exactly when the crops needed bringing in, exactly when a farmer wanted a few more hours of working light. It is the closest thing the sky has ever offered to a streetlamp over the fields, and for centuries it let people keep harvesting long after the sun had given up for the day. A moon that clocked on for the night shift, so the summer's work could be finished.

I think of that last dinner outside, the one I never manage to notice at the time. Back in May — a lifetime ago, at the other end of all this — I stood in a lane and wrote about the elderflower foaming in the hedgerows, that brief pale two weeks that mark the seam where spring tips into summer, gone almost before you catch it. This is the other seam. The same kind of hinge, running the other way: the fortnight where summer tips into autumn, marked this time not by a flower opening but by a tomato going cold, and by a jumper fetched from indoors, and by a door quietly closed on the last warm evening of the year. The elderflower and the last tomato are the two ends of the same summer. I seem to have spent the whole of it eating my way from one to the other.

And here is the consolation, which is real, and which I offer to anyone else feeling the small grief of the closing door. The end of eating outside is also the beginning of eating to keep warm — and eating to keep warm turns out to be one of the great pleasures of the whole year. The soups are coming. The slow-braised things, the roasts, the ovens left on all afternoon filling the house with the smell of dinner three hours before dinner. The chutney made from the last sad tomatoes, opened in the dark of December. The quince, cooked patiently into something jewelled and extraordinary. The chestnuts, the goose, the steamed-up windows, the good excuse to stay in. Summer feeds you generously and asks nothing; you eat it standing up, in the light, in a hurry, because it will not keep. Autumn asks for patience and gives it back with interest.

So I will fetch the jumper. I will carry the plates inside. I will close the door on the last warm evening without, once again, having noticed it was the last. And then I will light the oven, and put a squash in it, and get on with the far better-lit business of being cold — under a moon that is, even now, coming up over the fields to see what is left to bring in.