Notes On: How to Romanticise October

The best month of the year

I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers – L. M. Montgomery

Even now I remember those pictures, like pictures in a storybook one loved as a child. Radiant meadows, mountains vaporous in the trembling distance; leaves ankle-deep on a gusty autumn road; bonfires and fog in the valleys; cellos, dark window-panes, snow – Donna Tartt

---

If autumn is a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, then October is a month of velvet and champagne and smoke curling into cold air like hope. It is the main character of the months: the kind of month to arrive late to a dinner party, cigarette in one manicured hand, a bottle of red in the other, some musky scent trailing in her wake. If October were a book, it’d be written by Donna Tartt. If a poem, it would be by Emily Dickinson. If it were a song, Lizzy McAlpine. Or Phoebe Bridgers. Or perhaps Fleetwood Mac. To me, October tastes like cinnamon, or something toasted. Pecans, or walnuts, sticky with maple syrup. It smells like petrichor, and woodsmoke, tangled with that sweet-sour scent of too-ripe apples.

October is for burgundy, and long cream candles dripping with wax, and saying yes. It’s for rewatching Breakfast at Tiffany’s and reading the Modern Love column and purchasing books in hardback because life is short and books are forever and also isn’t it wonderful to support art, in this crumbling world? October is for curating playlists and being unapologetic about your love of ‘basic’ things (pumpkin spiced lattes, Taylor Swift albums, the concept of brunch). It’s for incense and doing things for the plot and making brownies with white chocolate in them and eating it right out of the tray, with a spoon, just because you can.

October is for embracing the mess of this life: make-up strewn over the bathroom sink, too-late nights and hangovers that make you never want to drink again and art that makes you want to crawl into it and dreams that make you want to open your arms wide to this world. You might have guessed, by now, but October is my favourite month. Not just because it’s my birthday, and not just because of the fashion, or the New Yorker covers, or the fact that Taylor Swift always seems to release music in October. It’s also my favourite month because it’s one of the only times that we, societally, allow ourselves to accept the concept of decay; it’s honest and unflinching in its acceptance that, yes, things do come to an end. Death exists here, too. Not everything has to be perfect and everlasting.

And also because walking outside in October feels like stepping into a watercolour painting: it makes you see art, and beauty, everywhere – and isn’t that just so special?

---

Notes On: Spicing up October

• First, I hope you got yourself a gift for surviving September. It doesn’t have to be something big: it could be as small as a takeout coffee, or letting yourself have a lie in at the weekend. (You could always treat yourself to a paid subscription to your favourite writer, or podcast, too).

• I can’t quite tell you the science behind this (read: there isn’t any), but October is the perfect time to manifest. Not in the woo-woo sense (well, kind of), but more in the go for what you want sense. This week, I’d like you to write down three things you’d like to have before the end of the year. Write them somewhere you’ll see them again: in your notes app, or even on your calendar with a reminder set for January. Don’t just write down what you want: write down, too, how you’re going to get it. (This will make you 68% more likely to achieve the goals). (Yes, I just made that statistic up). (But I’m pretty sure I’m onto something).

• Do something for your inner child, this month. Climb a tree. Go apple bobbing. Carve a pumpkin in the shape of a cat. Make friendship bracelets. Try face paint. Make a pillow fort and light some candles and eat comfort food and watch Mary Poppins. We all go about this world, as adults, pretending: to have our shit together, to be in control, sometimes even just that we’re okay when we feel like a bruise. This month, let yourself have fun, and let yourself be, and look after yourself as you would a child. It’ll make you feel so much more yourself.

• October is for fire escapes, and marshmallows, and watching the sun set, and asking people questions, and blackberry gin. So: go somewhere with a view and a drink, or a fire and some marshmallows, and reconnect with your curiosity. Other people are the most interesting part of this world: don’t let yourself forget that.

• October is – I think we can all agree – the most bookish of months. So: do either a book swap, or a book group. Something that makes you chat, with someone you love, about books that make you think – and feel. There is (almost) no conversational topic more interesting than dissecting a book together. (Some recommendations for October are below).

  

• Choose one evening to sit in stillness. This world moves so fast, and there are always so many things to grab at our attention with: adverts and text messages and, of course, the infinite scroll. Our attention is constantly being bought and sold and grabbed and manipulated, which also means that carving out time to let your mind wander has become a luxury. If you can, take one evening (or a whole day) this week and turn off your phone. Let yourself meditate, sit in quiet, perhaps cook some soup. Remember that your brain is an organ that needs rest, too. That when you’re so busy consuming, consuming, consuming, all the time, it’s very hard to actually digest. That a peaceful mind feels like an open seascape, a silky face mask and crisp, newly washed sheets on a Sunday night – all at once. Take some time to find that feeling, this month, if you can.

• Start 75 Sparkling!!! This is a wholesome antidote to 75 Hard, and it’s all in service of getting your spark back and becoming your sparkliest self. Read more about it here.

• And finally, October is for embracing the mess. For letting the junk mail pile up and forgetting to take out the recycling one week and ordering a takeout pizza because you can’t be bothered to cook and saying ‘fuck it’ and also YES, as much as you can. For doing your best whilst also knowing that perfection is not something to chase, but something to avoid. A pristine, untouchable orb: utterly devoid of feeling, of intrigue, of smudged-mascara. So: say yes, as much as you can, this month. To pudding; to party invites; to yourself; to life. Because – and yes – I’m really going to say it – you only get one.

---

Your Reading List

• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

• The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

• Dracula by Bram Stoker

• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

• The Secret History by Donna Tartt

• Luster by Raven Leilani

• The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

• Blue Nights by Joan Didion

• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

• Beloved by Toni Morrison

---

One final note

The thing about the society in which we live, in 2025, is that we must watch devastating, heart-wrenching news from across our fractured world every day, and still, we’re expected to go to the gym and wash our hair and blow dry it and smile in meetings and ask colleagues about their weekends and edit ours to sound more sanitary. ‘I spent Sunday crying, actually, and ate baked beans on toast because I couldn’t deal with leaving the house’ becomes ‘oh, not much, just a cosy day in, it was lovely.’

We are expected – and required – to exist continually within a state of cognitive dissonance. Yes, there’s a genocide happening, right now, in Gaza. But at the same time, your best friend is getting married and it does matter exactly what cocktails you’re planning on making at her hen do. Yes, Trump is rolling back women’s rights and the far right is rearing it’s loud, stampeding, racist, ignorant head as it marches in the streets of London but also Taylor Swift is releasing new music and wasn’t Selena Gomez’s wedding beautiful? It’s doublethink. Constant, unavoidable doublethink. We all do it, all the time, whether we realise it or not. Which is all to say: it’s okay if your October doesn’t involve velvet and something sparkling and hangovers and lipstick stains and star-like highs.

It’s okay if the winter feels like a curtain being drawn, slowly, across your life, until everything is in shadow and you’re wading through greige. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s all okay. No art was ever made in perpetual happiness. Because perpetual happiness doesn’t exist. Art comes from the crushing complexities of existing as a human in this world: the lonely bus ride home after a day of work where you got everything wrong; the feeling of being left behind in life by your best friends; the sense that everything is beautiful and also fleeting and the heart-bending realisation that you’ll never be exactly how you are, right now, as naïve, or young, or perhaps deeply sad. I hope, this month, you allow yourself the space to be exactly how you are, and that you treat yourself as you would a little child, as you do so (lolly pops, stomping in puddles, curling up to watch animated films, letting your heart be free and un-sabotaged by your own thoughts). I hope you dance to at least one song and eat some really good banana bread and make at least one mistake and forgive yourself for it and, most of all, I hope you grasp onto your life and find it within yourself to stitch compassion into every one of your October days.

---

A reminder:

Each month, I release a digital only zine, for paid subscribers only. It’s called The Noters’ Club, and it’s in the style of a Y2K mag, because we all have this collective nostalgia for magazines right now.

This month’s zine includes:

• September Favourites

• The Culture Corner (articles + book reccs)

• Your guide to breaking up with your phone (an essay, and ‘how to’)

• Your October Curriculum

• An essay on radical honesty in art (this isn’t sex and the city)

• The Life of a Lit Girl

• A Taylor Swift themed quiz

The Noters’ Club section, featuring:

• Secrets from Readers

• Ask Hannah (advice column)

• Noter Club Spotlight — where I highlight one of you lovely readers and your art, business, or anything you’d like to share.

Upgrade to paid before tomorrow morning to receive your version. And - as ever - thank you SO MUCH for being here.