October

October. A month with a misleading name. It sounds as if it should be eight (which indeed is what it once was in calendar terms), but it is ten. It's pretend month, pretending it is still summer when it isn't. It is depression month, the month of realising that it has all gone again - the summer that is. However much some will protest that it is their favourite month - for reasons of relative quietness, often fairly pleasant weather, and the prospect of rest after the slog of the season - they doth protest too much, methinks. Take the summer out of Mallorca and one is left with a void of anti-life. Mallorca, despite the claims for all-year tourism, is summer. Mallorca is summer. It is not October, nor any month from now till May. If Mallorca is not summer, then what is the point of it? Despite the mildness and calmness (save when a typhoon lifts roofs), we hanker after the disappearing heat and the vitality of summer because these are purposeful. It, summer, has meaning, which the off-months do not. October, a month that can be blessed by the unoppressive mid-20s, is also the month of retreating daylight, of preparation for winter heating, wood gathering for some, butane-bottle accumulation for others. It is, nevertheless, a month of resurgence, of a peculiar re-birth, of greenness returning to lawns, the consequence of reappeared green shoots, heavy dews, rain and the onset of the damp humidity which is the constant of the winter months. But within these shoots grows also moss and lurk mosquitoes and flies, waken from the slumber of the heat months and themselves invigorated by the storm time.

October is also the month of assessment and appraisal, of how it all was and of how it will all be, and in the latter category there will not be, for a number one fears, any "all be". Not anymore. The hotels have not been subject to the mass early closures that were being predicted. That some will close at the start of the month is earlier than normal, but to close towards the middle of the month is not unusual. Those that stagger on to the going back of the clocks do so in the hope of the last burst of tourism energy, the British half-term. But the hotels and the bars and the rest lay off those without the heat months of employment record and so the incapacity to claim the dole. October is panic month, of wondering about survival, of anxiety and worse.

October is the month of moving, of uprooting, of seeking opportunities on the mainland and in the Canaries, of following the employment afforded by phoney summers that exist in the Costa del Sol and Gran Canaria, but at least phoney summers exist there. Not in Mallorca. From October. The great bacon-frying and terrace-touting diaspora collect their belongings in a suitcase and cause an unseasonal rise in the figures passing through Palma airport. But they are going, not coming.

October is the month of whitewash, newspaper and bin-liner stockpiling. At some point, the glass fronts will be obscured, papered over, washed out, the movable and vulnerable signs and lights secured within bulges of taped-up black plastic, the pick-up will be loaded with chairs and tables, the mattresses will be left outside the entry to reception. And on All Saints, the final rites of pretend summer will be read and it really will be gone again.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Simply Red, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izOdvBmTDh0. Today's title - Irish, as if you didn't know.

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