Today is officially the first day of Autumn. The time of yellowing leaves, the scarves-and-shades combo and the last dying gasps of BGFT (Beer Garden Fun Times). Unfortunately, this is the Autumn in movies rather than in IRL. Get ready for the season of changing your clothes four times a day because you keep getting too hot, and other hells that never seem to make it onto the silver screen.
Expectation: You don't have to wear tights until December
**Reality: Sure. Enjoy your frozen vagina. **
Let's start strong and bold, shall we? Autumn is the time when you're convinced you still don't have to wear tights because the thought of cheap nylon against your bronzed calves makes you shudder, and you don't fancy getting thrush. Problem is, if you go tights-less in this changeable season your day is nearly 100 per cent guaranteed to follow the same pattern until you give in: wake up and feel cold but optimistic, sit in the heated office, nip to Pret at lunchtime and feel fairly good about your non-tights decision, leave work and go to meet friends, arrive with frostbite covering your entire lower body. Autumn cold doesn't hit you like Winter cold. It slowly creeps up your legs, like that bit in *Day After Tomorrow *where Jake Gyllenhaal runs from that crackly frozen sound/CGI effect, until hitting your pants and numbing you right through.
Expectation: The satisfaction of stepping on crunchy leaves
**Reality: Stepping on dog shit. **
Images of walking down leaf-strewn streets, stepping on the crunchy ones and kicking all the others may appeal, but you haven't thought through a number of hazards. Mainly that the leaves are merely masking loads of dog shit. While the image may be romantic, the reality is you kicking loads of dog shit at other pedestrians or stepping on a crunchy leaf on top of more dog shit. Or fox shit if you live in a city/on my road.
READ MORE: How To Make Your Summer Wardrobe Work For You In Autumn
Expectation: Cosy Autumn nights
Reality: Darkness
Of the soul. No, just kidding, I'm talking about actual darkness. Like when you stay for a drink after work and emerge at 7.30pm to find everything pitch black and the prospect of walking through that dodgy estate in order to get to your flat looms like, er, a big dodgy estate. Also this is the time when you're not used to going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark, so it's a horrible surprise and can make you feel a bit gloomy because Christmas isn't close enough to alleviate it.
Expectation: Bonfire Night
Reality: Bonfire Night
Oh c'mon it's a load of balls. You stand there for ages with around 5 million people squeezed into a park that holds roughly 30 and by the time the fireworks start, you're starving and feel sick from the weird hot chocolate you bought for £7 from a stand. Maybe I've just had bad experiences. If you enjoy it, then good luck to you.
**Expectation: Nailing your autumnal wardrobe **
Reality: Constant clothing changes
Come Autumn we're all essentially Kim Kardashian at an awards do. The sun comes out, you take off your jacket. You go inside, the overly aggressive heating makes you remove another layer. You go back outside and a gust of wind forces you back a layer. It starts to rain so your jacket goes back on. In order to go anywhere it becomes necessary to carry a wheelie suitcase and that's for those of us who don't care about matching our umbrellas to our clothes. I pity those people.
Expectation: BGFT
Reality: BGA (Beer Garden Anxiety)
Will it be open? Have they started closing them already? Will it be really empty because it's Autumn so nobody's thought to go and sit in a beer garden? When you get there will it be too cold? Will it be too full because everyone's had exactly the same idea? You sack it off and go to your beer-garden-less local because you can't make up your mind and the pavement's too full of leaf covered dogshit to actually even get there anyway.
**Expectation: Enjoying the outdoors while you can **
**Reality: Wasps taking their anger out on you **
They're dying and are all pretty naffed off about it so if one of them gets up your tights-less billowy boho skirt you're going to be in for a stingy treat. And not stingy as in 'tight with money' but stingy as in 'I've been stung on the upper thigh by and angry autumnal was.' Any faintly desperate picnics organised to make the most of the fading heat will be totally ruined by four striped arseholes trying to fly into your nose. No, not the food. They're dying, they don't care about food anymore, they care only for revenge. And revenge, to a wasp, is best served up your nose.
Follow Stevie on Twitter @5tevieM
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.