AT around this time I tend to enter into a form of denial.

September and the first half of October can often offer dry and sunny days ones when you’re confident to peg washing on the line and leave your umbrella at home.

So I try to tell myself it’s still the summer. If it seems a little cooler I decide it’s only an exception, and it will warm up a bit in a day or two.

September sometimes offers an “Indian summer” and did in Cumbria this year. It crept into October as well. An Indian summer is still a summer.

And I try to hang onto it as long as possible, because I really dislike the cold these days.

Autumn is the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” according to John Keats, and is admired for its multiple shades of red, brown and yellow.

Snow can of course be beautiful and often astonishing when you wake up, open the curtains and find everything outside dazzlingly white.

But I’ve slipped on ice on the way to work often enough to know that it’s not for me. Give me warmth and sunlight any day.

In some ways it’s reassuring to note the recent drop in temperatures. They say that climate is what we expect and weather is what we get – but when the weather becomes extreme and behaves in more unexpected ways all over the world, we should be glad of a certain predictable normality.

This year Britain had its wettest February and driest, sunniest May on record. Records like these are getting broken with frightening regularity. At least it’s a cold, wet late October as usual.

For those who like autumn and its colours, upmarket chain Waitrose have come up with a brand new product this year.

Its well-heeled customers can now buy “Autumn Seasonal Foliage” – in other words autumn leaves – at £6 per bag. The leaves are promoted with the tagline: “Bring the outside indoors.”

It demonstrates that the spirit of free enterprise is still alive and well in our supermarkets, and that some people have more money than sense.

I saw one sign this week that usually appears in late summer and early autumn and would suggest we’re not into the coldest depths of the year just yet.

One evening a spider scuttled quickly over my living room floor, emerging apparently from nowhere and then disappearing under the sofa.

The same evening another one sped equally rapidly across my bedroom floor.

Spiders begin seeking a mate in the late summer so I’m assuming the two I saw were hurrying off to find a girlfriend or boyfriend while there was still time.

I don’t know whether they were of opposite sexes but I like to suppose they were, and that maybe they found each other.

I have no phobia surrounding spiders, snakes or enclosed spaces. I’m more troubled by rats, great heights and Monday mornings.

And a domestic spider or two is no great danger in this part of the world and can be an asset. One of the advantages of living in Britain is that our spiders are only a danger to flies.

But what do spiders eat these days? This year I hardly saw a single insect.

In summers gone by there were plenty of wasps, bees, flies, butterflies and other small winged creatures around, but lately they’ve been conspicuous by their absence or near-absence.

It could be just that I’m outdoors less often than I once was. If there seemed to be more insects in the past it could be because I spent more time playing football or climbing trees than I do now.

But it’s not just my imagination. The scientists are noticing it too, all over the world.

Keeping tabs on insect numbers is much more difficult than monitoring birds and animals. But they have discovered that around 40 per cent of our insects are in serious decline and one third are endangered.

At the present rate they could vanish within 100 years.

It matters because they are food for other creatures, pollinators of the plants we eat and recyclers of nutrients. If they go, other animals go and we could be next.

The causes are said to be the use of pesticides on an industrial scale, urbanisation eating up green spaces and hedgerows and climate change.

In other words, it’s humans’ fault.

Many of us dislike creepy crawlies but we can’t live without them. What are the chances anything will be done to save them in time?