In October

Dreaming of mushrooms and learning to like Halloween

Upgrade to an annual subscription for a chance to win my writing essentials • Forthcoming live events - details below

---

As soon as October arrived, I started to dream of mushrooms. I was walking through a field, and looked down to see a fat penny bun at my feet, its brown cap perfectly smooth. I picked it up, and as I was admiring the pregnant white stipe - not a wormhole in sight - I glanced around me to see that I was surrounded by the same fungi, clustered in twos and threes as far as the eye could see. I woke up with triumph slowly draining from me. There were no mushrooms to be seen the last time I walked. 

That is my October fantasia, though: I’m forever hopeful to stumble upon mushroom utopia. I’m not even sure it’s possible in this part of Kent, where the boletes are late and sparse, but the woods always smell as though it might just happen at this time of year. In truth, I go out with my basket and mostly find mud. 

Thank goodness for fly agarics, the red-and-white spotted toadstools that seem to strike fear in most of the population. I adore them: their bright caps light up the undergrowth at this time of year, filling the forest with witchy promise. After attending a fly agaric study day a couple of years back, I now feel a peculiar connection to these little red beings of the woods, traditionally used in medicine for pain, menopause and sleep. It seems to me that you can befriend them once, and they will forever greet you. They are now a true October pleasure of mine, and I’m slightly pleased that they repel all the right people. 

October was once the friendly transition into winter, before the cold really sets in. It is hard to know what it will bring anymore, now that our climate is overthrown. The news is already full of floods and high winds, terrifying destruction across whole swathes of the world. I wonder if, from now on, October will bring dread rather than dullness. Here, in the temperate south of England, we grumble at the lack of hard frosts and the relentless wet, knowing all the while that it’s absolutely nothing in comparison. The planet is growing wild, restless, furious. 

I began October with a funeral this year, a good old friend who died unexpectedly aged just 53. That is a little more mortality than any one of us would prefer. I stood in the rain and watched the old gang - the drinking buddies of our twenties - hoist their friend into the chapel shoulders. I wondered when we got so old, all of us greying and uncertain of the form. His stepchildren - who I used to babysit - ushered us through the service. The tables had been turned on us, and we were the last to know. We spent the afternoon reminiscing about old times that seem impossible now, a lifetime ago, a dream. 

But then, October always was a study in mortality. Like Christmas, Halloween seems to get earlier every year now, and I’m learning not to mind it. I’ve started to enjoy the spooky kitsch that litters all the shops all month; it’s cheering. I am less keen on the fact that Bert is saving up his pocket money to buy it and bring it into my house. 

In the Celtic tradition, the veil between the two worlds wears thin at this time of year. In the encroaching darkness, all of time seems to merge, and the past feels close. My winter sleeping habits have begun already, the waking in the night, regular as clockwork, for two or three hours. It is my fault, probably, for going to be so early, but then the dark nights offer me so little. I am training myself once again to get up, and to read or write, lighting only the lamps to signal to my brain that this is not morning. The dog barely stirs; her circadian rhythms are less easily confused. Already, I am enjoying the peace of my midnight hours, all alone. 

And sleep, when it comes, is deep and velvety in this dark half of the year. I dream of mushrooms, crowded like children on the forest floor. 

What I’m loving this month: