The Summer

It’s that time of year again. The average, rotund British male has liberally sprayed himself with a generous coating of lobster-red spray tan and the ‘phew’, ‘scorcha’ and exclamation mark counts have all rocketed in the tabloid newspapers*. Yes, it’s the glorious British summer, all one week of it. British families are flocking to the beaches in droves to claim a square metre of sun-baked sand for their very own. Parents will spend a fortune on whippy ice cream that will invariable end up melting on the aforementioned sun-baked sand 2 seconds after being handed to their children. Children will run around like idiots kicking sand in each other’s faces and ice creams, before burying their baby brothers up to their necks in the sun-baked sand and waiting for the tide to come in. Parents will shout at their children for being irresponsible, inconsiderate and intolerable. Children will cry. Baby brothers will cry. Parents will panic and franticly seek to extricate baby brothers from the sun-baked sand before the tide really does come in. All will march back to the car and drive home in silence. And then, a few weeks later, once the temperature has dropped and the rain has returned, all will reminisce about the wonderful time they had that day at the beach.

A few years ago it would also have been the time of year we all moaned about how rubbish we are at tennis and how no British person is ever going to win Wimbledon, or even, probably, get to the second week, ever again. We’d then rub the pain in even further by bringing up the fact that it’s a game we jolly well invented, which means we should have some kind of automatic cosmic right to be good at it (a bit like cricket, and football, and rugby...) But then some Scottish chap came along and ruined our fun, so now we have to find something else to moan about, which brings us back to the weather.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not built for sunshine, which means that summer is probably my least favourite season (a statement that almost amounts to sacrilege in a sun-worshipping nation such as our own). I can’t help it. I have eyes that automatically shift into an oddly pensive ‘squint mode’ as soon as the sun pokes out from behind a cloud and a skin tone that can be best described as reflective. I melt in the heat and I don’t seem to brown, I just grow more and more freckles until I resemble some kind of giant walking dot-to-dot puzzle. (At least that’s what happens to my arms - the rest of me doesn’t get out in the sun very often for fear of blinding the neighbours, so it’s hard to tell just how it would respond.) I do, however, have a wife who loves the sun and a daughter who would happily play out in it from dawn till dusk, so I’m learning to be more tolerant and appreciate it for the blessings it brings: after all, without this glorious summer weather the plants wouldn’t grow, we’d all get rickets and topic-starved bloggers wouldn’t have such an easy subject to fall back on.

Well, that’s it for now. Catch you all next week and don’t forget the lotion.

(* The cheaper ones at least: the Daily Mail and Daily Express are invariable more concerned with the hazards of locking your elderly relative in the car whilst popping to the shops for a bottle of milk, or telling us we’re all about to die, or at least be moderately inconvenienced, by sun spots/holes the ozone layer/global warming/the polar ice caps melting/plagues of green fly/plagues of locusts/plagues of German tourists eyeing up our sun-loungers/killer hornets invading from the continent/killer spiders invading from the continent/malarial mosquitoes invading from the continent/plagues of plague-ridden giant rats infested with mutant insecticide-resistant fleas invading from the continent on giant inflatable sun beds, possibly, but unconfirmedly, aided by German tourists eyeing up our sun-loungers <please delete as appropriate>.)