Though the silver birch trees were turning to autumnal gold, sum- mer was back this week with a fury, despite me writing it off, but it was probably too early to speak of an Indian summer. The earliest known use of the phrase comes from a Frenchman called John de Crevecoeur in the eastern United States in 1778. It perhaps referred to a spell of warm weather that allowed the Native Americans to continue hunting a little longer. The phrase reached Britain in the 19th century, replacing ‘Saint Martin’s summer’ that had been used to describe fine weather close to St Martin’s Day on 11 November. The sun was hot on my dark T-shirt, and I pulled my cap down to shade my eyes.

Today’s grid square was a rare outing to the far side of the river, to the very edge of the map itself. It felt like a new country. Over that next hill lay lands unknown, and maybe even dragons. I cycled up a stony bridleway through a wood, making sure to savour the greenness before the leaves fell for another year, to store away the memories as nourish- ment to get me through the winter. The year was winding round to its close, and I was going to miss these outings. They always cheered me up after tedious bouts of real life, such as queuing this morning to col- lect a parcel from the post office, which turned out to be in some other distant depot. Holly berries ripened in the dim woodland light. The path became a holloway, with beech trees arching overhead and their tangled roots exposed on the elevated track sides. A nuthatch scurried up and down a trunk, calling ‘dwip, dwip’ as it searched for food, then

hung upside down while it ate.

The gate’s clang startled a buzzard who lumbered off the ground and flew into the sanctuary of the trees. I stood still in the field, feeling myself beginning to slow down and unwind. I breathed in the smell of hay, blinked at the sunshine, and reminded myself that things couldn’t be too bad if I got to call this ‘work’.

Riding here had been a confusing maze of winding lanes and high hedges, so I hadn’t yet orientated myself with any other familiar grid squares nearby. The road had been too narrow for cars to pass my bike safely, so I’d had to stop and tuck in whenever a vehicle appeared. This allowed me the chance for a blackberry update, nibbling one or two while I waited for each car to pass. A few were ripe and swollen, but most were still small green nubbins.

A good old chunter about access rights, the right to roam, and Scandinavia's approach to allemansrätten.

My hopes were high. It was a perfect sunny day and the grid square looked enticing on paper. It was mostly woodland, with some contour lines, a small lake and the site of a Roman villa thrown in for luck. There was only one building on the whole square. A motorway and railway sliced through the middle, but a third of the area was a country park and all the rest was open countryside. I was looking forward to roving around a pleasant landscape dotted with enormous trees.

And yet...

And yet, it turned out that the solitary building was a historic manor house that owned most of the grid square and resolutely refused to share it with plebs like me. I was shunted away from the meadows and ancient trees by signs and fences, and ushered instead down an unattractive path squashed between the motorway and a metal fence. I hoped I could at least explore a small copse, but that turned out to belong to a golf course and was also off-limits. And the lake was ringed with forbidding notices from the fishing club that owned it.

So far, the most enjoyable part of the outing had been standing on the motorway bridge and watching the hypnotic traffic hurtle beneath me.

I cycled to today’s grid square with Test Match Special playing in my headphones. Listening to the ebb and flow of a cricket match arcing towards its conclusion is one of my greatest pleasures. I turned it off reluctantly when I arrived so that I could concentrate on what I was exploring.

I began outside a working man’s club with a fluttering Union Jack, then rode among Victorian terraces, streets of post-war pebbledash, and 1980s semis. A brick clock tower had been built in the town cen- tre with the largesse of the local mill owner 150 years ago, and the mill’s chimneys still smoked away in the distance. There was the usual array of shops and eateries: convenience stores, kebabs, fried chicken, Chinese, Indian, garage doors (that was a first), and a bookmaker. It was a typical old-fashioned town of struggling shops and pubs sliding into decline, plus a shiny new Domino’s Pizza takeaway.

An elderly man laboured across the street with his shopping trolley. A car slowed and waited an age for him to cross. ‘That will be me one day,’ I thought to myself, ‘sliding into decline.’ And, ‘Be grateful then for this moment,’ I reminded myself. This moment is my life

It seemed to me, walking and cycling through this year on my map, that the seasons move in two ways: gradually, then suddenly. No change, no change, no change... and then one morning the new season is well on its way, overlapping the previous one in its eagerness to get going. I caught the first embryonic smells of autumn today, along with heavy dew and a noticeably later sunrise.

I always enjoy daybreak, though doing the school run means I’m rarely free to head out and play at such an hour. But I managed it this morning and immediately felt I was winning the day. It took an hour to ride across my map to the grid square, and I had time to enjoy the sun rising, the rabbits in the fields, and the foxes slinking home after a big night out.

I had waited for the rain showers to pass before heading out today, but I was forced to shelter from a fresh cloudburst beneath a bowed old horse chestnut tree. Sheets of water slid down the road and dampened my enthusiasm. I had, however, spotted the map symbol for a pub on today’s grid square, and I had little to do later.

‘Go for a look around the square, and after that you can go to the pub,’ I bargained with myself.

It had been a warm and humid day between the heavy showers. Aside from traditional British grumbles, which we all enjoy, the weath- er had not actually been too bad recently compared with, say, the year 1816, when ash clouds from a volcanic eruption in Indonesia shrouded the world in an extended winter. Mount Tambora’s blast was heard 1,600 miles away and plunged the 350 miles around the volcano into darkness for two days. It was the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded human history.

Over the next year, a cloud of ash spread through the atmosphere, wreaking havoc with the weather for three years. The resulting potato famine in Ireland led to a terrible outbreak of typhus and mass emi- gration. North America’s arable economy crashed, causing the panic of 1819 that pushed the country from being a commercial colony towards becoming an independent economy. In China, three consecutive har- vests failed, prompting farmers to plant poppies in place of rice, with far-reaching and long-lasting global consequences.

But while Tambora’s eruption caused widespread famine and dis- ruption, the strange weather also influenced an output of poetic and musical works infused with gloomy genius and named for the Greek god of fire: Byron’s Prometheus, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus, and Schubert’s first commission, the cantata Prometheus, composed to a poem of the same name by Goethe.

Volcanoes erupt now and then, and weather conditions also swing back and forth naturally, but sane people are in agreement that human behaviour is now causing climate breakdown far beyond natural var- iations. A clear and alarming demonstration of our extravagant and irresponsible way of life was the occurrence of ‘Earth Overshoot Day’.

Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity’s annual demand for ecological resources and services exceeds what the planet can regenerate in that year. It means we’ve used up our sustainable bio- capacity for the year. We deal with the deficit for the rest of the year by borrowing from the future and gobbling limited reserves of ecological resources more quickly than they can be replaced, if at all.

Qatar and Luxembourg’s Overshoot Days for the year were back in February. Britain’s was in May. The only reason the world’s Overshoot Day as a whole is as late as August is because the poorest countries are still living within their means. They prop us up, while also bearing most of the burden and consequences of climate change.

Sustainable living dictates that you must meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. We are clearly failing to do that. How long would you tolerate the behaviour of a friend who guzzled voraciously, overspent in his own interests, then came to you each August asking you to bail him out for the rest of the year?

I filled my bottles with ice before heading out this morning. It was the hottest day of the year, and Britain was parched by an unusually severe drought. As I got ready, I heard on the radio that 20cm of rain had fallen in an hour in Germany, causing floods that killed almost 200 people.

The last of the morning dew felt cool on my toes as I cycled down a grassy path in my flip- flops. In the crisp, brown fields, the harvest seemed to be ripening before my very eyes. A silence hung over the day, which reminded me of Spain. A distant voice carried from across the fields. I was roasting. And it was still early. I envied a buzzard whose feathers ruffled in a breeze as it perched on a pylon by the railway.