England is perfect in autumn. Colours, conkers, blackberries. Small firm dappled apples. Red rosehips that thrushes love, beaks back, swallowing them like jewels. The green-yellow frog-skin of a comice pear. Beech and ash leaves fall before oak leaves, and in city streets as well in the country, the spiky, split horse chestnut cases crunch against the soles of your shoes in the deepening drifts of leaves.

I know that in a second there won’t be any trains running because of leaves on the line, but if it were a choice between leaves and trains, I’d choose leaves. Every autumn I am amazed at the economy and intelligence of Nature, which sheds what she no longer needs to survive the winter and remake herself for spring. Self-help manuals and management gurus make a lot of money explaining what can be understood on an October walk.

Shed. Store. It really is as simple as that. I don’t mean store things in the shed; I mean shed what’s done and store what’s not.

That is how to have a happy winter and avoid one of those inner winters of the King Lear kind, where you are losing your mind on a blasted heath, or a winter of discontent, where the politicians told us it was going to be summer for ever — (boom, growth, blah blah), and suddenly the banks had all collapsed. It might just be that you want to get to April without putting on 6st or catching swine flu.

The answer is not to be fixated on increase. Just about the only thing that increases without check is a cancer cell. That is not a good model either for our lives or for the economy. I have a couple of hedgehogs in my garden — and they are pretty busy just now stuffing themselves with slugs, while Mrs is checking that the space under the greenhouse has been decorated by Mr just the way she wants it — lots of leaves please, no TWIGS! (Like most girls, she’s fussy about the detail).

Animals in autumn readying for winter will store what they need, just as bulbs and nuts and seeds are microstores that carry forward the coming crop. The fall time, the fallow time, the dead time are not wasted time; they are waiting time, which is very different. We have got into a crazy world of instant and always. The fashion is for “on demand”, which is as far away from the order and economy of the natural world as it is possible to be.

And “on demand” is not how happiness happens. “Instant” is not how to recover from sorrow. “Always” allows neither change nor variety. What autumn offers back to us is a model for living — it’s a harvest of many kinds; it’s how we learn to value the things that we really need, and to let go of what’s done.

The special beauty of autumn is not the springing exuberance of new growth, nor the ripeness of summer; it is a complex beauty, with melancholy in it. The richness of the sunsets, the shortening days, the intensity of colour hold the moment passionately because it is passing.

For me, an autumn walk is always a memory place. I am more aware of time because the season itself is a blaze of time — time flaring through the light, so bright that you have to look away, and then it’s gone. Time that isn’t clock time but seasonal time — the urgency of everything that has to happen before winter, before cold, before dark.

But it does happen, because Nature is urgent but never rushed, and she’s flamboyant and extreme — do we really need all those leaves — but never wasteful. Only human beings are wasteful.

In the autumn time feels short, but that there is enough of it, which is paradoxical. Time being a tricky thing to think about is best done alongside Nature, where it seems to make more sense than it does by clock or by calendar. And the memory place that autumn is uses time itself as a container for the things that we keep returning to and trying to understand.

The reflective melancholy of autumn helps me to cope with change and loss, and to find both beauty and necessity in things passing. Ageing has a splendour to it.

Our culture cannot accept that. I think of those lines of Donne: “Nor spring or summer beauty hath such grace/ As I have seen in one autumnal face.”

Brisk walks and bright loss. The delight of being in a whirlwind of leaves, and getting home under an early moon. The crossing clouds of the sky with the sun shot through them. The evening star, astonishing in October, the bright band of Orion in November. The surface of still water cut through with the edges of stars. The damp shock of overnight mushrooms. The activity of animals, the rush of bird life. The final burst of beauty, without restraint, that happens before the dead days.

All this is ours. Dr Johnson, he of the dictionary and the gout, thought that the English were an autumnal people, and therefore poetic, if poetry is on the cusp of things, the forward and back of the mind, the caught moment opening into a lifetime.

And so it seems, as the kids run ahead collecting conkers and finding leaf drifts deeper than themselves, and we walk through the strange combination of quiet and racket that is autumn, of activity and stillness.

And what better, afterwards, with our lungs full of clear air and our eyes full of falling light, that a bottle of thick red wine and a pheasant or a wild duck and a few little turnips and carrots in a dish with a handful of parsley?

Summer is sexy but autumn is for senses and for the soul.

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