Impossibly Autumnal Skies

A certain kind of sky, a certain kind of restlessness there - that mix if blue sea-like sky and red-gold tinged clouds. A sense of something vast and stirring, something ancient waking.
All wrong though, but it was certain nonetheless - this was autumn I was feeling. Coming into spring and I was feeling autumn.
Western Road was busy with people heading home - or to the shops, and they moved as people do in autumn, a hurried but luxurious gait something longed for is coming. The light from shops fell onto the slightly darkening street with a September solace. Traffic lights in the distance flashed red, amber, green in dream-like serenity. The church by the big Tescos was like something from an M.R.James ghost story. I stood amongst the graces and took photographs of its silhouetting architecture.
A taste on the wind. That turn, that switch, that phasing at the end of September - balancing on a needle between seasons. This was not spring, this is autumn. In that taste of wind, there was the layout of streets in old towns, of watches at windows of rented rooms looking down into dark gardens. Stir-fry and soya sauce, hallway lightbulbs, and all those strange arcana of autumns.
Outside the entrance to the Mews there was a single street lamp that had just come on. One of those beleaguered bulbs they are gradually fading out that burn a bright orange. When they first light up though, their start-up hue is a deep crimson, a sunset red, the tones of nightfalls from childhood. Against the greying, impossibly autumnal skies, it was a perfect colour, a transient thing, sober and portentous in the quickly swelling night. Rare as wounded emerald, mundane as coffees from the vending machines at work.
I tried to take a photograph of it, but each one failed, and the moment passed too quick, and it began to turn to its night-time orange instead.
I came inside, walked up the stairs, smelling with the sting of chemicals from the workshops below, and it still felt like autumn.