Nobody decides it. There is no day marked on the calendar. It just happens one evening in the middle of September, when you come in from the eight o'clock walk and the dog is damper than you expected, and rather than putting the towel back in the cupboard under the stairs, you drape it over the radiator in the hall.
And then it stays there.
That is the moment the year turns. Not the equinox, not the clocks, not the first time somebody on the radio says the word autumn. The towel moves to the radiator, and everyone in the house understands that this is how things are now until roughly March.
The small archaeology of a British hallway
It starts with the towel. Then the lead stops living in the drawer and starts living on the hook, because there is no point putting it away when it will be needed again in eleven hours. Then a coat appears over the bannister. Then there are two towels, because one of them is always still wet.
By the end of October the hallway has quietly reorganised itself around a dog who goes outside four times a day and comes back in slightly wetter each time. Nobody planned any of it. It assembled itself, the way these things do, out of a hundred small surrenders to the weather.
Your dog knows the radiator now too. They have worked out that the warm towel comes off the warm metal, and they stand in the hall dripping with the particular expression of an animal who has learned the order of operations and is waiting for you to catch up.
The part nobody tells you about
There is something genuinely lovely underneath all the mud, and it takes a few autumns to notice it.
Summer walks are easy and slightly impersonal. Everyone is out. The park is full. You walk further, you talk to more people, the dog meets nine other dogs and you go home. Autumn walks shrink back down to the two of you. It is darker, it is emptier, the light goes amber at four and then goes altogether. You know the route by feel. The dog stops at the same gatepost they have stopped at every night for years.
And then you come home, and there is the bit that summer does not have at all. The hallway. The towel. Two minutes of rubbing a wet dog dry while they lean their whole weight into your knees, because being towelled is the best thing that has ever happened to them and it happens every single night.
That is not an inconvenience you put up with in order to have a dog. That is one of the actual good bits. You just have to be told once before you see it.
Seven months of this
From here to spring, the ritual barely changes. Out into the dark, back into the light. Wipe the paws. Rub the chest and the ears and the top of the head. Say the same nonsense you say every night in the same voice. Hang the towel back on the radiator so it is warm again by morning.
Seven months, twice a day, is somewhere north of four hundred of these. They will all blur into one. That is how it works with the things that matter most: they are too ordinary to remember individually and too constant to imagine being without.
One winter, further along than you would like to think about, the hall will have no towel on the radiator, and you will find that the emptiest part of the house is the part that used to be the most annoying.
So this year, notice it. That is all.
A gentle practical note
If you are about to promote your worst bath towel to dog duty for another season, there is a better version of it. A Microfibre Dog Drying Towel with Hand Pockets is 1400gsm, which means it lifts genuinely more water in thirty seconds than a bath towel manages in three minutes, and the pockets mean your hands stay dry and you get a proper grip on a dog who has decided this is a game. It is £8.95, and it dries out on the radiator by morning instead of sitting damp all day.
And if the dog is arriving home soaked to the skin rather than merely damp, a coat is not vanity. The Eco-Friendly Sarah Raincoat at £39.99 is made from recycled ocean plastic and keeps the back and chest dry, which turns a fifteen minute drying job back into a two minute one.
Neither of those is the point, though. The towel on the radiator is the point.
Have a look at the Walkies collection if you need anything for the dark half of the year. Free UK delivery on orders over £30.