Let us rejoice that September is here, when all that is gracious triumphs September is a great month for writers - the quickened rhythm of the world in its turning, the reviews of your friends" and competitors" latest volumes and the new reading crop all impart 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 the leaves colour and no day is a settled thing. In September they are all kaleidoscopes of lights and moods. WH Auden wrote his best work in September. In Good-bye to the Mezzogiorno, a valediction to the southlands of Italy, he concludes: though one cannot always remember/ Why one has been happy,/ There is no forgetting that one was. It is a sentiment that could stand for the summer of rains, 2012, when Britain proved itself damp-proof, and nothing, not our politics, our problems nor our prospects could stunt our spirits or the parties we threw for the Queen and for the world. Our multitudes of visitors were not surprised by the rain, but the smart ones will come this month - the atmosphere of London in the autumn is every bit as stimulating as Paris in the spring. You might not feel like admitting it now, but if you really wanted to live in the land of the midday sun, where one screaming summer day is the same as the last and the next, where the nights are all sweat and mosquitoes, then presumably you would have moved there. Instead you choose to live in our temperate latitude, in a country of anticyclones, maritime winds, fleet brilliance and gallivanting cloud. Nevertheless, it would be very kind if we could have some Indian summer weekends now, when the sunlight feels like the blessing it is. Lack of sun has bowed us a bit: a lady outside the chemist's told my mother she feared she would get rickets. She is thinking about going away. That is one option. Or you could walk our hills and lakes and track the year's change as it comes. The swifts are gone already, the cuckoos, chiffchaffs and nightingales will follow. Their departures are good signs, signals that the globe is still working. In their place the geese will come, the waders, redwings and fieldfares. Rooks will switch to their autumn roosts and starlings band together at dusk. The winds will rise as the light angles more obliquely: a sailor told me he has noticed many more gales around Britain in the past 20 years. There will be mad-flung days when children are as skittish as kittens, and there will be still, clear ones, with bonfire smoke streaming straight up. If the Gods are jealous of us it is because we die, and therefore live more vitally. Watch people walk under tumbling leaves, observe the swallows gathering on the wires, see the strewn skies and feel the first pinch of cold in the wind. Life is not a summer of rains nor a winter of snows. But it might just be a jumbled, dappled thing like a September day, changeable, vigorous, blowing and tilting between one thing and another and full of sensation.