Unlike practically everyone else I know, I am an Autumn person. I relish the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, I love it when the clocks go back and darkness falls early, when the night fizzes and pops with fireworks, when the ghoulish anticipation of Halloween brings chills and nervous fun.

Autumn evenings are made for sitting up against a hot radiator with a good book and a snifter of something smoky and strong, for jumping nervously at a creaking floorboard in an otherwise empty house, for gazing out of blackened windows at the strings of sodium-orange streetlights on distant hills.

I like all this stuff. In principal. But the reality is often different.

That early darkness? Yeah, it’s great when you arrive at work in the dark and leave work in the dark and start to develop translucent skin like some subterranean cave-dweller.

The fireworks sound romantic in theory, but largely involve repetitive and annoying barrages of unentertaining bangers going off and off and off, scaring the cats and waking small children from their beds.

Halloween would be great, but for all those kids who insist on knocking at the door and holding their hands out expectantly for some kind of loot, like little horror-masked muggers.

Those morning mists are a pain if you have to drive, and while the turning of the leaves might be pretty to look at, it’s no fun if you have to sweep a load up from the street or your garden.

It pains me to admit it, but I’m having more of the latter thoughts about Autumn these days rather than all those daft poetic notions I used to hold. Which, it feels, is a surefire sign that I’m turning into a grumpy old man.

I’m not sure at what point this happens, but one day you wake up and the sun’s too hot or the snow’s too cold or the spring wind is too fierce or Autumn has just lost all its appeal. Attitudes to weather must be a touchstone to ageing.

So with this in mind, I am going to spend the next week re-connecting with the old me who used to love Autumn. I am going to kick my way through piles of soggy russet leaves. I am going to dress up with the kids on Halloween, even if it is just to scare each other around the house. I am going to read ghost stories with a glass of something strong and intoxicating, and I am going to breathe deeply of the heavy mists as they rise with the late sun.

The seasons turn on and on and there’s nothing we can do about that, because that would be turning back time. But perhaps I can turn back my attitude to the progression of seasons, and time, at least.