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.


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