The October Paradox

October is a paradoxical month. Lacking quite the same “fall” as Britain or the same striking changes in colours of the landscape, it is easy – when the sun shines on a Mallorcan October – to believe that it is still summer. But its heat has a ghostly presence. The increasing dampness makes it morbidly vaporous: nature’s equivalent of the spectres escaping from a butane-fired burner or from a paraffin heater of distant memory. If heat can be allocated a colour, that of a Mallorcan October is a pinky-blue.

October is a month of apparitions on the beach, the ghosts of summer fading into the memory. If September is the sad month, one of the winding-down of summer, it is, nevertheless, and from the middle of the month certainly, far enough away from the season’s end for a period the length of a school summer holiday to still stretch ahead and console us with the knowledge that summer has life left in it. But in October, there is the incongruity of the dawn and twilight of finality. There is nothing beyond October.

Before the season proper starts in May, April is the month of the phoney season, the warm-up for what is to come. October is the warm-down. It is the month of the forsaking season, the giving-up month, in more than one sense. It is the giving-up on summer and, for some, the giving-up on everything – the abandonment month. The final weekend sees the clocks going back, but there is no turning the clock back on a business fading as surely as the sun does. Ever more for sale and for rent signs appear. These signs conspire, together with the gradual covering-up of glass frontages with whitewash or newspaper and the wrapping-up in plastic of lamps and lights, in making the resorts slowly wither away for another year, taking some businesses with them – for all time.

The remains, as October proceeds and gradually imposes its cruel decomposition, are skeletal resorts. They are shaking bones and skulls with rictus grins which mock tourists with a sinisterness of closure as ominous as the gathering clouds that bring the fierce storms of late summer. And on All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day at the start of November, the days of the dead represent the final passing of summer into its afterlife and the resorts into their clichéd state of the ghost town.

October is the cruel month, but not completely. Though its storms can bring turmoil, it can also bring tranquility. The end of the season comes ever closer, the days are counted down. A growing sense or anticipation of relaxation takes hold. It can be a cruel month, but it can also be sublime through the elated spirits of knowing that the sentence of summer’s hard labour has been served. Sublime also in a stillness, when the storms don’t blow. If the landscape doesn’t alter that greatly, the seascape can. Hovering above the calmness of a bay, let’s say Pollensa’s, is a haze that is the product of the vapour of October warmth. It forms an eerie range of colorific monotones, a blanket and shroud of greys and silvers for the sea and hills. If it is appropriately deathly, it is benignly so, the kindly smothering of our last few days. It has the comfort of strangeness.

For this is what October is. A strange month that is between states. From life to no life. And from summer to winter, because of the strange division of the Mallorcan seasons into two semesters, one that denies October its right to be what it is – autumn. The paradox month; not really one thing and not really another.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Summer Is Over

“I’m off to gather mushrooms.” Those wacky French, always truffling around in the undergrowth snouting out fungus. It had never occurred to me that anyone, let alone a French visitor, might trek up to La Victoria and usher away the mountain goats before they could snaffle all the fungal booty. But it’s that time of the year. Into the forests they go in search of firewood – not, I guess, that they’re meant to – and the they is anyone with a wood-burner. Unused for several months, the burner is now being relieved of old ash and being re-commissioned once more. 

 

The dew hangs thick on the grass that leaps up in a matter of a few days. It is this, the dew, as much as the torrents of September, that brings lawns back to life and to enjoy a spell of rapid re-growth before the sun loses more of its power and the gardens retreat into the winter time. Snails slime out from beneath stones, while the dying cicadas, in their shrouds of browny-grey, slam against walls in their last moments of disorientation before coming to rest and to await the ants. Flies crawl on terrace furniture and erratically buzz into faces; persistent, they land on arms or lobes, seek out spots to rub their legs in kitchens and bathrooms. The spray should kill them as well the autumn-returned mosquitoes, but rarely seems to. 

 

The days shift from clear skies to grey, from calm to wind and from temperateness to chill. The beaches, where in summer the kiters and surfers are barred, now are littered with the colours of sails, boards with graffito go-faster, heavy-metallic blazes, and obsessive, freaky-haired surfies squeezed into wet suits. The wind from the sea is starting to cut. Hands reveal a purpleness unseen since early in the year, and jackets are zipped up to the neck, heads poking out from upraised collars that are caught on gusts and smack against an ear. 

 

The “butaneros” are newly busy. Orange bottles, hidden in utility rooms, are lugged onto the streets to await the parping of the gas truck. Heaters are wheeled out and re-acquainted with the containers that vaporise their spectral, watery toxicity. In the supermarkets, the shelves change their contents, the greengrocery becomes greener as the likes of broccoli come back into fashion as the complement to legume-based stews. Refreshing summer whites begin to disappear as heavy reds regain their dominance in the wine sections. 

 

From wardrobes and drawers come sweaters and sweatshirts, destined for the wash to fragrant-conditioner away the mustiness accumulated in the dead air of summer. Heavier clothing may be needed, but there are still tourists spirited enough to be shirtless and to take the iciness of a beer where a tea is demanded. The glass facades of some hotels are already whitewashed as end-of-summer shutdown signals the sad end of another season. 

 

Winter’s coming, and the tramuntana north wind blows south, forcing sand back against the wooden barriers and the flaking paint of shore-side villa walls. The sea rebels against the turquoise of summer. Turbulent, tossed by the tramuntana, it shrieks a green-seaweed greyness – an army colour, that of a tank – splashing up its detritus onto the water’s edge, building castles of kiwi-moulded sea grass on the sand. The anger of the bay roars through the night, remonstrating with a forlorn and desperate desire to eke out just a few more hours and days of the season. 

 

Summer’s over.