Farewell then, summer, we hardly knew ye.

As the last day of August looks up at us with rheumy, puppy-dog eyes that plead for us to kill it stone dead with two halves of housebrick clapped roundly about its scraggly, pathetic little head, and vow to speak no more of the rain and the wind and the below-par temperatures, we look ahead to September and the delights of autumn that are dragging up their rustling skirts of browning leaves and tiptoeing towards us, smiling with a mouthful of decaying teeth signifying the slow dying of the year.

And those said delights?

School beckons, with the daily morning ritual of getting half-way up the road and having to dash back like Usain Bolt to fetch the forgotten reading books/PE kits/grand piano/spent uranium.

The clocks go back, that stolen hour disappearing into some Doctor Who-like vortex and dragging with it the joy of actually arriving at and leaving work in daylight, transforming us into disheveled zombies with translucent skin that seemingly live dark, subterranean lives.

Wrapping up the barbecue, barely used, in waterproof tarpaulin and shoving it into a corner, only to be dusted off next spring when it will be criss-crossed with the hard, dry slug trails of the last of summer and hiding in its bowels those two coal-like burgers and a scorched chicken leg that you always meant to throw in the bin after the last sunny day in the garden.

The rains will come, driven by howling gales into that gap between the window frame and the wall and bucketing down into the living room, just like they did last winter, and which you promised would never happen again because as soon as it dried up you would attend to it, before forgetting all about it as soon as spring came.

The joyful sight of small children wearing plastic horror masks from the pound shop gathering at your door, muttering in guttural tones “trick or treat” and holding out their hands like dwarfish robbers demanding Twixes with menaces.

Putting on the central heating after a summer (even such as we’ve had) of low fuel bills, and watching the meter readings rise like the Bonfire Night rockets which will start to be let off weeks before November 5, sputtering into the cloudy sky and exploding with passive-aggressive pops that seem to say, “I know I’m the 18th rocket to go up in an hour, but what’s wrong with you? Don’t you like having fun, you miserable old sod?”

And then, while trying to look on the bright side and see the beauty in autumn like Keats and his season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, the first dire mutterings come of snow and ice and chaos, and before you know it DFS are urging us, pleading with us, threatening us that we simply must have a new sofa delivered in time for Christmas.

On the other hand, I read the other day we might be having an Indian Summer, so chin up, eh?