{"id":117,"date":"2020-09-02T15:05:40","date_gmt":"2020-09-02T14:05:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/almosttheweekend.com\/?p=117"},"modified":"2023-05-10T09:34:09","modified_gmt":"2023-05-10T08:34:09","slug":"autumn-after-the-sort-of-summer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/almosttheweekend.com\/autumn-after-the-sort-of-summer\/","title":{"rendered":"Autumn (After the Sort-Of Summer)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Passing Seasons in the Pandemic<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

September always feels like the real start of autumn. Even though the end of August in Scotland is definitely cool enough to be classed as autumn, it\u2019s still the start of September that heralds the change of seasons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

September is the orange-and-yellow month, the conkers-and-toadstools month, the (hopefully) crisp-air-and-sunny-skies month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alas it\u2019s 2020 and we\u2019re in uncharted territory, so somehow everything feels a bit different, doesn\u2019t it? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But autumn, the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness (and by fruitfulness I like to think Keats actually meant CRUMBLE),\u00a0 does autumn feel different because of ongoing restrictions, or is it really because summer as we know it never really happened this year?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 The Autumn Reset<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Autumn has long been recognised as a time of new starts and positive change: the new academic year begins and there\u2019s a sense of resetting and beginning afresh after the summer. But this year though\u2026 This interminable year when the world stopped for a while, and when so many of the ways that we mark the passing of summer were off the table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Long-awaited holidays and travels, end-of-school trips and summer camps, graduations and weddings, music and arts festivals, big summer cinema releases, the Olympics, Wimbledon. These are some of our summer standards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was the year of the sort-of summer.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Autumn<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

The Sort-Of Summer was Sort-Of Fun<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In the sort-of summer, we still enjoyed warm weather and we still sat in the sun. But mostly we did it in our gardens and local parks, and we did it in small groups. And if we were planning to enjoy a larger, hotter version of that sun on a foreign holiday, we most likely didn\u2019t get to do that. We travelled less far and less often.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the sort-of summer, the kids were off school, but as they\u2019d been off school since March the novelty had long worn off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the sort-of summer, we saw sports take place behind closed doors, and cultural events move online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And in the end, mostly because the sort-of summer came directly after the spring-of-nope-no-way-definitely-not, then it was sort-of ok.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And now? Well, with the arrival of autumn, some normality has returned. Kids are back in school. More things are open. But we know that Winter Is Coming, in the most Game of Thrones sense, so let\u2019s enjoy autumn\u2019s sort-of normal. I\u2019m off to kick the leaves in the low sunshine and look for conkers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The season of transition and new starts is here. But, like everything in 2020, autumn feels a little different this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":260,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_blocks_custom_css":"","_kad_blocks_head_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_body_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_footer_custom_js":"","_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17,16],"tags":[21,27,28,25,20],"class_list":["post-117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-autumn","category-seasons","tag-autumn","tag-coronavirus","tag-covid-19","tag-lockdown","tag-seasons"],"taxonomy_info":{"category":[{"value":17,"label":"Autumn"},{"value":16,"label":"Seasons"}],"post_tag":[{"value":21,"label":"autumn"},{"value":27,"label":"coronavirus"},{"value":28,"label":"covid-19"},{"value":25,"label":"lockdown"},{"value":20,"label":"seasons"}]},"featured_image_src_large":["https:\/\/almosttheweekend.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/autumn-leaves-1024x683.jpg",1024,683,true],"author_info":{"display_name":"Almost The Weekend","author_link":"https:\/\/almosttheweekend.com\/author\/admin\/"},"comment_info":21,"category_info":[{"term_id":17,"name":"Autumn","slug":"autumn","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":17,"taxonomy":"category","description":"Autumn's here! Kick those leaves, grab a scarf and let's appreciate the very best of autumn this weekend.","parent":16,"count":10,"filter":"raw","cat_ID":17,"category_count":10,"category_description":"Autumn's here! Kick those leaves, grab a scarf and let's appreciate the very best of autumn this weekend.","cat_name":"Autumn","category_nicename":"autumn","category_parent":16},{"term_id":16,"name":"Seasons","slug":"seasons","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":16,"taxonomy":"category","description":"Appreciate the season, and get a bit more weekend feeling into your everyday. Come in, relax...it's almost the weekend.","parent":0,"count":33,"filter":"raw","cat_ID":16,"category_count":33,"category_description":"Appreciate the season, and get a bit more weekend feeling into your everyday. Come in, relax...it's almost the weekend.","cat_name":"Seasons","category_nicename":"seasons","category_parent":0}],"tag_info":[{"term_id":21,"name":"autumn","slug":"autumn","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":21,"taxonomy":"post_tag","description":"","parent":0,"count":3,"filter":"raw"},{"term_id":27,"name":"coronavirus","slug":"coronavirus","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":27,"taxonomy":"post_tag","description":"","parent":0,"count":3,"filter":"raw"},{"term_id":28,"name":"covid-19","slug":"covid-19","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":28,"taxonomy":"post_tag","description":"","parent":0,"count":5,"filter":"raw"},{"term_id":25,"name":"lockdown","slug":"lockdown","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":25,"taxonomy":"post_tag","description":"","parent":0,"count":3,"filter":"raw"},{"term_id":20,"name":"seasons","slug":"seasons","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":20,"taxonomy":"post_tag","description":"","parent":0,"count":12,"filter":"raw"}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/almosttheweekend.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/almosttheweekend.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/almosttheweekend.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/almosttheweekend.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/almosttheweekend.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/almosttheweekend.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/almosttheweekend.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/almosttheweekend.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/almosttheweekend.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/almosttheweekend.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}