Your drink order says more about your holiday personality than any personality test ever could. So sit back, pick your fave cocktail and get ready to book that trip the second you’re done reading.

There are two kinds of people in September: the ones who wait for the leaves to turn, and the ones who accept Starbucks' fall menu launch as the official start of the season. Dunkin dropped its lineup on August 19 this year. Starbucks followed on August 25. Neither date has anything to do with the equinox, and nobody cares.

Take it back to the beginning and there was something genuinely lovely about whimsy in everyday life. It meant a cute charm on your bag, mismatched socks, a strange painting you thrifted, or wearing something ridiculous simply because you liked it. I collect wine bottles and turn them into bangle stands. Whimsy at its best was about seeing what you already had a little differently. It was never about having more.

It was the first UK beauty brand to sell a million pounds in a day on TikTok. I bought it. Here is what actually happened.

You’ve finished the thing you were watching. You don’t want to start a series. You want someone clever to talk at you for a while about something you didn’t know you cared about: the history of the corset, why every girl on your feed now has the same slicked-back bun, what actually happened to the it-girl.

Every September the same photograph appears about four hundred times. A girl, a pumpkin, a plaid scarf, a caption with a pun in it. It’s fine. It’s also the visual equivalent of a chain coffee shop: perfectly pleasant, entirely forgettable, and located in the exact same spot as everyone else’s.

We all have that one show. The one we put on when reality becomes mildly offensive. The one we watch curled up in a dressing gown with a cup of tea, demolishing aggressively spicy ramen like it’s a form of self-harm, procrastinating when we’re meant to be revising, or (most dangerously) waiting for him to text back.

The mornings have quietly darkened, the evenings have folded in, and the loose, generous rhythm of August has become a problem to be solved before nine o'clock. Most of us solve it badly, by announcing a total reinvention on the first Monday of the month and abandoning it somewhere around half term.

Nobody has experienced real chaos until you arrive at the student kitchen on move-in day. Six people arrive within a few hours of each other, all clutching bags for life, and by the evening the flat owns four toasters, three colanders and not one tin opener. Someone has bought a candle. Someone else has brought an iron they will use precisely once.

“Ask a child to draw a car and he will certainly draw it red.” That quote from Enzo Ferrari has always resonated with me, especially after former F1 driver Sebastian Vettel’s claim that “everyone is a Ferrari fan” even if they “say they aren’t”. I hate to admit it, but he’s right. I’ve never outwardly called myself a Ferrari fan- choosing to support RedBull and Williams instead- but something Ferrari’s two wins this year have made me jump out of my seat with joy.