In the edges of days, in the confluence of tides, in the unclear lapping and lap-backing of the between-seasons is autumn. It can be obvious, a salute of blazing foliage, or disguised, slipping in behind distractions. In the south, the summer of St Martin ends in November, the brightest summer of all, its colours luminous under the Mediterranean blue, which changes, unblazes, dies down from August glare to soft September. ‘My favourite month!’ I think, in Septembers like that, forgetting that in July it was all going too quickly and that summer should always be wished for ever. But autumn has a summer and a winter. As I fear the latter a little, I love the former much. You find reflections of both at other times of year. Still spring days when the smoke also rises straight can have a little of autumn in them, the trees in half-colours, the blossom yet to break. Stars at evening seen through near-bare boughs could belong to either season.

I was taught as a child that you find you are ready for each earth tide when it comes. With the years, and with moving from the south to the north, I have learned how age dreads winter, which seems to last longer every time – and actually is longer where I live now. The yellow leaves of the lime trees, desiccated in August and dead in the gutters, always gave me pause in Verona. So soon?

In Palermo we swam until November then put on scarves. In Yorkshire we watch the miracles of the trees across the valley, their colours playing like notes across a keyboard, slowly. The hill opposite our windows is close and covered in a complete wood: alders by the beck, and above them sycamore, pine, birch, ash, oak and beech. We observe them pulsing through the spectrum in almost bemused delight until the rain thickens the windows and darkness falls until March. And then autumn is motorway rain and the dirty courts of service stations, greys and greases and the smeared crimson brake lights streaming into junctions, and days that seem to shut themselves down, disgusted and forgettable.

The names of the northern towns then seem written in heavy autumnal syllables and rain-dark stone. Warrington, Salford, Preston, where the equinoctial skies press down. You wish you were anywhere else. Autumn in New York. Autumn in Rome, Paris, London: the great cities might be made for the season, their towers of lights shining for longer as the months roll darker, and in the cooling mornings the sweet and smoky smells. In one of those offices I once set radio listeners a writing competition: winter without clichés. Autumn would have been much harder.

‘Even as a schoolboy I loved John Keats’s ode “To Autumn” for being an ark of the covenant between language and sensation,’ Seamus Heaney wrote. It is the time of richest sensation: the sights and the smells, obviously, and the way its daily varying temperature makes the skin hypersensitive; and then there are the sounds – rain, wind, dead leaves; and then its harvest of tastes, from traffic fog to cold clear days. It makes writers of the most pen-averse of us, because we have a need to turn sensation into language. In its brightness, its startling quality, its beauty and its inevitable slide to darkness, it is the season that most resembles human life. The first moment you can remember kicking up leaves is probably fairly contiguous with your first apprehension of death. All humans are in the autumn of their days – that’s life, and the other.

To the novelist, autumn offers a believable, dramatic, enticing setting: the trick of fiction is to make-believe, and autumn is the story season, a time of migration, equinox, transformation and incident, the things of which fiction is made. And obviously you want stuff to happen: it suggests adversity and change, great boons to any plot. Dickens was a great fan, beginning Our Mutual Friend and Bleak House in London autumns. Angela Carter starts The Magic Toyshop thus: ‘October, crisp, misty, golden October, when the light is sweet and heavy. They stood on the step and waited for the taxi with black bands on their arms and suitcases in their hands, forlorn passengers from a wrecked ship, clutching a few haphazardly salvaged possessions and staring in dismay at the choppy sea to which they must commit themselves.’

My best writing season starts in September. It is something to do with the new season of work, the real new year when school began or began again, and later, when you return to your office having reaffirmed your vows to be a better employee this time. The ideas come fresh, the sparkle of the days and their drawing in seems to put a fire under them, and the approach of the dark says ‘Haste!’ When I am not bound by teaching or lecturing it is the perfect time to travel, which is one half of writing for me. Airfares tumble, hotels have vacancies, beaches unclutter and lovers steal weekends and take city breaks. If I am work-bound I feed my travel hunger through the windows and with walking: suddenly the country is a mosaic of micro-climates. It is a happy time in the hills of Wales, my true home. Between the flies dying off and the cold closing in, farmers can ease up. If any are going to take a break they will do it between now and November. I love the days with sharp brightness in their breaking, suggestive scents and skies of many blues: pale azure and cool cerulean. E. M. Forster has a lovely description of such a day in A Room With a View: ‘It was a Saturday afternoon, gay and brilliant after abundant rains, and the spirit of youth dwelt in it, though the season now was autumn. All that was gracious triumphed.’

I may never match that, but at my desk the words come with the quickened rhythm of the world in its turning. The literary calendar puts a spring in things with the reviews of friends’ latest volumes and the new reading crop imparting urgency and inspiration. Or perhaps it is just that the muse is more bird than goddess. She shakes herself and takes wing now, as the hills change tones and no day is a settled thing. In September they are kaleidoscopes of lights and moods. I had an email from the author Niall Griffiths one day towards the end of summer, saying he had detected the coming of autumn in the wind in Wales: ‘Ah how I have missed it!’ he wrote.

Horatio Clare, 2016