Autumn is here again.
The walls are closing in.
Darkness arrives early and like an unwanted guest is there when we rise.
Foliage is wilting after a relentless summer.
The balding lawn is a desert of dust and paspalum. Tomato plants are flaccid. The basil's seeding. Any remaining fruit, anaemic.
This annual juncture is the stuff of Robert Frost's poem Nothing Gold Can Stay, where he writes "nature's first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold".
Poor autumn.
It's the sullied season.
Like the poem's theme it reminds us the Edenic ideal can only surrender to earthly dying beauty.
It's bullied by its fellow seasons. It's bullied by us.
One writer, obviously suffering from seasonal affected disorder, last week wrote "autumn be damned". By dint of the natural sequence of things, autumn signals a drop in mercury and daylight savings' farewell.
'Tis a tough gig following over-achieving summer.
Which frankly, is over-sold. If it weren't for Christmas, New Year and the fact most break from work in summer, it'd be as maligned as autumn.
Yet we continue to discriminate on the basis of season.
We're a fair-weather lot.
Wild blackberries and grapes are now upon us. Feijoas are imminent - from which my daughters will make icecream courtesy of the neighbour's overhanging tree.
Soon it'll be too cold for the interminable flies and mosquitoes.
Sleep will come easy.
Its temperance means there's no need to cool the house, no need to heat.
So welcome, autumn. Yes, all your leaves are brown and your sky is grey. Yet of all the seasons, you remind us of our mortality. You're anything but the summer of our discontent.
Experts: Climate change pushing penguin food deeper, causing starvation.