Nicole Junkerman on the Turn Towards November

October ends tidily, which is unusual for a month. The light has already done most of its shortening, the weather has committed itself, and whatever the autumn was going to be it has now been. Nicole Junkerman treats the last day of it as a hinge rather than a finish line, and the atlas takes a short look backwards before it carries on.

What the month settled

Three things usually become clear by the end of October, and they are rarely the three anybody planned for. The first is which of the year's habits are real. A habit that has survived the clocks changing and the first genuinely dark evening is a habit; everything else was weather. The second is which books were actually being read rather than carried about. The third is how much of the autumn was spent in two or three places, which the cities pages tend to reveal more honestly than memory does.

What November is for

November has a reputation it has not entirely earned. It is the quietest working month of the year in most places, which makes it the best one for the sort of task that needs a long uninterrupted evening and no audience. Finishing something half done is the obvious candidate. Starting something small and unimportant is the better one, because the weeks ahead are forgiving enough to carry a bad first attempt without anybody noticing.

There is also a small practical argument for the dark months, which is that they are cheap. Nothing is in season, nothing needs booking, and the places that were crowded in August are mostly empty and considerably better. A walk taken in the last light of a November afternoon is a different walk from the same route in June, and the difference is almost entirely in your favour: fewer people, longer shadows, and a much shorter distance between setting out and being glad you did.

The plan, such as it is

One shelf, reread rather than added to. One route walked again in the other direction, which is almost a different walk. One evening a week with the older pages of the notebook and a pencil. Nothing on that list is ambitious, and that is the point: a plan small enough to survive a dark Tuesday is worth more than a plan that needs an ideal week in order to begin.

There is a companion note here on learning something badly first, which is really the same idea arriving a few days early, and an earlier one on autumn quiet from the start of the month. The atlas and the reading pages carry on as usual, a little slower and no less interested.