Autumn is now in full fall, the temperatures are dropping, and the skies are greying over. But it’s still beautiful here most days…and rivetting at night.

In the late afternoon and early evenings, rain falls noisily through half-leaved branches. The process creates a symphony of sounds – the last of the nuts plonking onto damp grass, large raindrops plinking from one leaf to another, or just falling straight through with a thlunk to the earth. The cloud cover hides most sunsets, and this means the darkness can take one by surprise. But soon enough – and we have a large Moon at the moment to light the action – clouds scud across the dark sky with an effect oddly similar to looking at an old pre-digital negative. ‘Spooky’ gets only so close to describing it: it’s awe-inspiring, but more beautiful than frightening.

As clouds cross the Moon, I’m always reminded of Walter de la Mare poetry from schooldays, or other long-forgotten fragments of Poe verse recording “the tintinnabulation of the bells, bells, bells”. The grey light of night has inspired everything from grave-robbing novels to tales of blood-sucking vampires; but in these ‘modern’ times (when those of us lucky enough can, within seconds, reverse back into a warm house) the tableau is less threatening than it must have been for Early Man. No wonder the aborigines worshipped Sunarise….the saviour who drive away the darkness.

For me – lucky Western baby-boomer that I am – the onset of winter holds its own satisfactions of escape into hearth and home: warm soup with crusty bread, duck and pork cassoulets, log burners, and the hope of something on the TV that might put the telly into intelligent. And if the Tube yields nothing of any interest, then there is a good book…Peter Jukes’s hacking trial account, or a new biography of an old hero. That too easily forgotten experience of reading something brilliant, and moving from page-turning greed at first to page-rationing delayed gratification towards the end.

It’s dark so early now that even the Poles knock off at 7pm. We are twenty days away from the clocks going back, and a November when dusk blurs horizons from skies at around 5.15pm. I always feel a touch of melancholy then: for some reason, it takes me back to 1959, and my first year at Grammar School. I’d gone from wandering without a care through Heaton Park to Primary School – where I was a very big fish in a tiny pool – to being just another bright 11-Plus kid in an ocean of 1200 others….most of whom were bigger than me. Those dark evenings of the first winter there echo through the decades: cold knees thanks to short trousers, late home if one had earned a detention, maths homework I didn’t understand, music lessons with a terrifying psychopath, and the long, long walk home if one had lost the bus fare – which I seemed to do on a masochistically regular basis.

But the triumph over that early phase of life sees us through much of the rest of it. It took me around forty-five years to grasp the wisdom of examining the past positively, in order to say, “You thought you’d fail, but each time you didn’t: so have faith in your ability”.

That’s the sort of cognitive learning children don’t get under the current education system in Britain. That – and the need to understand who Edgar Allen Poe was – is one of the great perditions of a New Labour regime whose sinful and unrepentant minnows passed a sentence of intellectual death on all those who came thereafter.

Earlier at The Slog: George Osborne is become a destroyer of Wealth