Time Of The Season

The end of the season.

“Season” is a multifaceted word though solely temporal in its variety of applications. A play has a season, an artist can have a season, sports’ leagues have seasons. Some seasons’ ends have climaxes of excitement, such as football’s finals or final-day joy or despair. Some seasons’ ends have excitement and poignancy, like the last games of the cricket season when the conclusion of a championship coincides with the coming of autumnal mists and the loss of another summer. Some seasons’ ends have just poignancy, as in holiday seasons.

The last few days of the season are anti-climactic. They are relief or sadness. There is almost a sense of pitiableness to be in a restaurant with its plastic sheeting firmly in place, the waiters and waitresses going through the motions of affability as much as possible, knowing that in a week’s time they will be standing in queues for the “paro”. There is no occasion to the season’s end. This is a mistake.

The season’s end deserves more than waiting for and waiting on the last dying tourism embers. All those parties and fiestas of high summer are forgotten. Yet, much as there is Hallowe’en to perhaps enliven the season’s end, there is no ceremony comparable to high-summer’s flirtatiousness. The season’s end should be a harvest festival, a celebration of the summer’s vibrancy and romance, barely imaginable as this particularly sullen October comes to a close. The season’s end deserves a party, an uproarious completion. What it gets instead is a gradual taping up of facades, of parting, of a lingering end.

Until next year.


QUIZ
Yesterday - The Christians. Today’s title - which group? Easy.

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