When the geese fly south, it's time to head north. Standing on the white flats of the West Sands, near St Andrews, I watched a skein honk its way out to sea, towards a sun offering the last of this year's warmth. The wind followed them, northerly and bitter.
There were only a few other people on the beach. An elderly couple, wrapped to the jowls, were having a carry-on with a set of boules and a camera. Two young women laughed as they passed up through the dunes, chattering in Polish.
The West Sands are one of the treasures of natural Scotland, famous as a backdrop in the film Chariots of Fire, and in the summer they are packed. As I walked towards the surf, the wind picked up the sand and carried it in swirling columns in front of me. The dog waited, lying in ambush on a discarded water bottle, blinking against the scouring grains. The geese passed out of sight.
A scarf was wrapped tight around my neck, the jacket snug around my chest, and a strange Calvinist joy took hold. Part of my joy, it's fair to say, was wrapped up in the town that rose above the links - a porcupine in red sandstone, quills the steeples in this old academic and religious place.
It's easy to find somewhere miserable to grow mournful come November, and God knows I've tried. A winter spent alone in a Highland village notable for its ugliness. Forced walks through the mountains until my boots filled with blood. Or a week of solitude in a converted shipping container near the Coulport nuclear base.
And there is no shortage of seaside resorts that appeal in that mordant way, where discarded newspapers can be kicked as they float down the street on the wind. Angsty films offer a guide but somehow Betty Blue is never recreated, nor, caught out of time and out of place, does a weekend end in murder under the pylons of a rotting rollercoaster.
Still, I can but hope and so the prospect of a weekend of existential exhaustion had me studying the map: Bournemouth ... Morecambe ... Blackpool ... Ayr ... And then, my wife - concerned I might aspire to Jack Nicholson's role in The Shining - posited the idea of enjoying ourselves and suggested St Andrews.
It has a reputation, does St Andrews. My memory of the town is as a wee boy being arrested for shoplifting in a supermarket (long gone) called Wm. Low. The swag had been a packet of grapes costing 15½ pence, and I recall nobody believed that a big boy made me do it and ran away.
Perched out on the tip of Fife, St Andrews is renowned for its stuff-and-nonsense ladies with big bottoms, for posh students mimicking Kate Middleton's look, for golfers big on plaid and American accents. All of which is true, but, as it turns out, it doesn't do justice to the whole; to an ancient place of exquisite houses and history sitting above a wicked sea.
Walking through the dark streets on Monday night, fish suppers from PM's hot and sweaty in our hands, the street lighting seemed to have been set to low. The homes we passed were in streets with names more explanatory than romantic - Church, Castle, South, North. Each property was unique and spoke of its architect's originality. A big and fancy door on a squat Georgian home gave way to the neighbour's medieval turret, its entrance pointed like an Abbot's hat.
PM's has, so the literature says, offered fish and chips to the residents of St Andrews for four generations. The latest was ahead of us in the queue. 'A hamburger in batter, a white roll and butter and a diet Irn Bru,' he said before heading off to the fruit machine. His ancestors would be rolling in their graves at his wanting a 'diet' Irn Bru.
The streets were empty but for eight students emerging from a Golf. 'Yah, it was all I could do to survive freshers' week,' one said. While it might be better if St Andrews University weren't quite so posh, the students are, in so many ways, the lifeblood of the town, replacing the tourists who drift away with the falling leaves. 'These are the dead months,' said the barman at the Criterion, which has been on South Street for over a century. 'The months the traders fear.'
We ate outside, in the shadow of the ruined cathedral. The remaining spire at the west end, a knotty, spooky stem, pointed into a sky pricked by stars. The facades of the nearest homes were shadowed by a warm light that leaked from their windows.
Part of the joy, too, of St Andrews was staying in unrepentant splendour. The Old Course Hotel, a five-star hotel, is from the outside astonishingly ugly. Yet from within, it is honeyed with comfort and this was another lesson in heading in the opposite direction to the Greylags flying overhead: deals can be found at the best hotels, and wicked cold outside is improved by luxury within.
Our room opened out over the links of golf's most famous course and spread to the sea and the horizon. With a winter dawn, the light coming up late, the curtains could be left open and so we were woken by sunlight passing through clear cold air. Lying in bed and watching my wife sit by the window in this light was a beautiful thing.
Yet, the best reason for heading towards darker, colder skies is the silence. Here it is a peace that is, admittedly, broken by the roar of supersonic engines as fighter jets take off from nearby Leuchars base. But, putting this to one side, November St Andrews is disconcertingly quiet, offering extraordinary and affecting places to sit and rest in the winter sun.
The ruins of the cathedral and the castle were almost empty last week, the wind whistling through the stones as we wandered the graveyard, past monuments rich with skulls, hourglasses, and bones; dedicated to the memories of philosophers, sailors, shoemakers and golfers. St Rule's Tower, up which the French dragged a cannon so they could bombard the castle, was empty of others and for an age, perched high above the dead, we peered out over spires, sands and sea.
The castle - and I had long forgotten this - has two extraordinary relics of another age. One, in the sea tower, is a bottle dungeon, and to look down into the pit from the narrow neck is to face the full cruelty of the past, the closest horror I've felt to the slave dungeons of the Ghana coast. The other glimpse to a terrifying past comes in two tunnels, one dug by besiegers in 1547 the other - winding and panicked - dug by the besieged who heard them come.
Rightly, in summer these places will echo the delight of exploring children. Yet in winter, I was alone as I crouched and crawled through this horrid space, and it was as spooky as it gets. To then sit on a bench in the sun, looking out to sea, ate away at everyday concerns. I was little more than an hour from my home in Edinburgh but somewhere else entirely.
The Old Course offers a spa treatment called Cooler-near-the-Sea, designed (apparently) to 'mimic the North Sea's unexpected weather patterns'. In other words, somebody hoses you down with freezing water. I decided to pass. I also decided not to run into the sea itself.
There was none of the odd behaviour of the past - the obsessional battles with a rogue chaffinch that marked my time in the Highlands, the self-indulgent depression of the shipping container - but instead a lunch at the Doll's House, a restaurant I admit choosing for the opportunity to mock. Instead, and this was our first act on arriving, we ate a superb lunch of homemade celeriac and truffle oil soup, waited upon with a relaxed, witty ease. Our small break in the chill north, in the dead months, began like this and continued to delight, in its quiet perfection.
· Old Course Hotel (01334 474371; oldcoursehotel.co.uk). Doubles from £261.
More cold-weather beaches
ORFORD, SUFFOLK
Eerie mists swirl around the mud flats by the six-mile shingle spit of Orford Ness. Retreat to the Crown and Castle (01394 450205; crownandcastle.co.uk).
ST IVES, CORNWALL
Choked by crowds in summer, in November St Ives returns to being a pretty artist's haven. The sea is still warm enough to swim too.
SCARBOROUGH, NORTH YORKSHIRE
Hard to beat for its stirring views and wide range of activities, including funicular railways, ice-cream parlours and classic fish-and-chip shops.
BURNHAM MARKET, NORFOLK
Holkham Beach, 'the country's most romantic beach', is a huge expanse of sand, where you may see racehorses being exercised in the surf. Try the glamorous Victoria Hotel (01328 711008; victoriaatholkham.co.uk).
WHITSTABLE, KENT
The beach sees stunning winter sunsets, but the big draw is the food. Try the Oyster Fishery Restaurant (01227 276856; oysterfishery.co.uk).
