It’s October, it’s autumn – and that only means one thing: It’s Gilmore Girls season

Hot chocolate in the boot of a car, pumpkin picking, scraping fifteen layers of mud from your wellies – this season is pure, unadulterated, Lorelai and Rory-style #AutumnCore

It’s cold but crispy; the sun a watery yellow against your skin, the sky a startling, duck-egg blue. As you walk, your feet crunch over leaves like an autumnal carpet – a tapestry of golds and reds and soft browns. Somewhere, close by, there is a dog poo, gently obscured by moss. Still, this pretty, halcyon image means one thing, and one thing only: it’s Gilmore Girls season.

Yes, it’s autumn – fall, if you’re in the US – time for pumpkins and fairy-lights and hot soup and cold fingers in cut-off gloves clasping the hand of someone you love (or just downright fancy); a Christopher, perhaps; a Max or a Luke or a Lane (hopefully not a Logan). If you’re feeling frisky (and who isn’t, am I right?) then you might find yourself sneaking out to meet your very own Jess Mariano, lurking moodily against a lamp post in a leather jacket, clutching something by Chekhov he definitely hasn’t read (swoon).

If you live in a small town or village, you may have already started to see Halloween decorations popping up in people’s windows; a spider web decorating the corner of a notice in the corner shop, perhaps (yes, it’s your very own Doose’s), a stack of gourds being rolled out to the middle of the town square or water fountain or that bus stop that nobody local would dream of sitting in, because it smells of wee.

Still, it’s romantic, innit: this spooky time of year, the mass marketing of witches’ hats and broomsticks and cauldrons (though if you’re anything like me, those are year-round staples) in the hectic run up to Christmas. It’s cold and it’s about to get more so, thanks to the cost of living crisis (hands up if you’re too afraid to turn your heating on?) – still, we’ll take the small comforts; we’ll content ourselves by watching and rewatching our favourite TV shows and wrap up in a duvet and daydream of when it will be warm again; when any of us will feel warm again.

We’ll get a little jolt of excitement at the prospect of “going for a walk” (when at most other times it’s just a chore, let’s face it). This month, we’re up for it; suitably dressed in hats and scarves and long-johns, this chilly, bright, marvellous October – and we ache; we ache to spend time with the people who nourish us: the Sookies, the Rorys.

(Though of course, you can’t mention the fact that December is on the doorstep without eye-rolling the fact that with Christmas comes family, and with family comes dinner with your very own Richard and Emily, with all their, “so, when are you going to get a proper job?” or, “are you still not dating anyone?” Shame.)

To keep up to speed with all the latest opinions and comment sign up to our free weekly Voices Dispatches newsletter by clicking here

Strangely, there are no pubs in Gilmore Girls; there are only Very American Bars with red booths and chrome accents, or house parties on campus at Yale, or the terrifyingly precocious gatherings of the Bullingdon Club-esque Life and Death Brigade – and that is not for this season. No, this season is #AutumnCore (allow it) and I am coining it.

For true #AutumnCore (which may as well be called #GilmoreCore) we want little country pubs that remind us of the Dragonfly Inn; we want homestead furnishings and plump floral cushions and Laura Ashley. Oh, we want Laura Ashley all over the place if we can manage it – even the curtains – and chunky roll-neck jumpers and soft wool and borrowing your boyfriend’s sweater just so you can pull it down over your hands and look cute, look positively ingénue, even when you are 41.

We want towering roast dinners and lashings of gravy you could sink a small boat in; we want fire pits and smores and spiced lattes and family road trips to pick pumpkins, the highlight of the year: Bobby Pickett’s “Monster Mash” blaring, someone stuffing down a sausage roll, someone else crying because the iPad has run out of batteries on the short ride out to some boggy farm in Essex, hot chocolate WITH cream AND marshmallows spilling down your faces in the boot of the car while you scrape fifteen layers of mud off your wellies (and of course you’ve forgotten to bring napkins, of course you have). For when it comes to cooking and/or parenting, and being organised, some of us (mentioning no names) are just slightly more Lorelai than others. Just saying.

Still, we love this season more than any other, we really do – because it’s for everyone. And if you’re a Gilmore Girls fan, then you probably love it even more than that. Altogether now: “Where you lead, I will follow.” Ahhhhh.