SO another summer’s come to an end. There’s dew on the car in the morning and cold creeps in as soon as the sun disappears behind the hill.

Where did summer go? Was it a good one?

It’s October today. September went by without us even noticing. The clocks will soon steal an hour of light from us and, for a short while, we will revel in the annual novelty of cosy nights in and pub fires.

Slowing down time in this frenzied, pell mell life today is difficult, isn’t it? I know someone who’s started going to a Buddhism centre in Brighton to get tips on how to stay in the moment.

Meditation and the like is not for me. I’m too Anglo-Saxon. But it seems to be working for him.

He has an infuriating calmness about these things now while I’m on my usual lament about time slipping through my fingers. The helter skelter disappearance into the distance of minutes, hours, days, weeks and now even years.

The onset of fading memory is the terrible twin of fear of the passing of time. The summer just gone is a case in point. I think it was pretty good but I can’t be totally sure. When memory fades we are in trouble, for it is what makes us.

The great surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel once said: “Life without memory is no life at all. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing.”

I’m not going to disagree with genius.

Although I cannot fully absorb the mindfulness movement, which is spreading along the South Coast like Dutch Elm, I have tried to slow things down. I’ve had a go at staring out of the window at home for a bit but can never think of anything to think. Have you tried that?

A friend of mine spent some time in a flotation chamber recently. It was terrifying. Just him, darkness and his thoughts, or the shocking realisation that he had none.

In the end I suppose we have to find a way of taking the endless clicking around of the seasons in our stride. And in this at least we are a little luckier. For nothing changes quite so dramatically throughout the year as the seaside. As the seasons push and pull people, tourists and locals alike, into different shapes and places. The mobs of summer and raucous hens replaced by contemplative couples and secret rendezvous.

Our seafronts are such radically different places in the hot and cold seasons, it’s almost like having the double delight of living in two places.

I prefer it in the winter when seafronts take on a desolate, abandoned feel.

Two winters ago a friend and I went out for a drink on a bleak night.

Walking home past the closed-up amusement arcades on the front we heard a terrible cackling laughter. As we turned a corner a solitary light illuminated the gloom. Someone had forgotten to switch off the laughing policemen gift-every-time machine outside the arcade. There was the ruddy-cheeked policeman, rolling about on his hydraulics, insanely gibbering behind the glass to no-one. In summer unnoticed and unheard but now ringing out for miles around. Now that’s the sort of brilliantly sinister scene that even I can never forget.

Look, I could bang on about holding back the clock forever but the production editor has just put her head around the door and told me I’m late filing this piece and “space won’t fill itself”. I’ve run out of time.

The Argus: Jeffrey Lewis.  Picture: Martin Zahringer

Music recommendation slot (number 7 in a series of 8,000). Last week I was privileged to be among about 150 people in a dingy, sweaty dive called the Windmill in Brixton. There my younger son and I saw the Jeffrey Lewis and Peter Stampfel Band.

I love Jeffrey. He’s a New Yorker, half bitter-sweet balladeer, half fuzzy rock ‘n’ roller, singer songwriter, skilled cartoonist and wicked lyricist. And he’s so DIY and the Future Of Music he asks fans to put him up for the night after gigs and presses his own CDs.

I’d never seen beatnik hero Peter before but the banjo and fiddle-playing veteran is a mad-as-a-box-of-frogs life-affirmer. He’s 76 going on 17. The band played ramshackle rock, bluegrass and country with such verve. I don’t think I’ve been to a gig as joyous in years. And I go to a lot. Do yourself a favour. Go to Jeffrey’s brilliant website and listen to he and Pete’s Just Another Inch of Rainfall. If you’ve not got a smile as wide as the Southwick Tunnel on you by halfway, I’ll refund you the cost of this newspaper. (normal rules apply!)