Sarah Carson
Chief Culture Writer and Contributing Editor
There’s a blackboard outside the pub near me that is making me feel guilty. “Make the most of the sunshine before it’s too late!” it demands, in block capitals, inviting patrons into its street-side beer garden. The next time I walk past, I reckon I’ll just kick it over. I already feel bad enough about this summer. I do not need to be reminded of my failures by a pub.
The British summer is always a mixed one – for me anyway. All year seems to build up to it. I load it up with promise, I expect a fantasy of picnics and barbecues and rooftops and concerts and festivals and beaches. At the start of the season it always feels like the life I dream for myself might finally get to happen. A life that is simpler, analogue, outside. At the beginning of May, I remember sitting outside a restaurant feeling sincere excitement about all the spontaneity and opportunity hoving temptingly into view. Cut to mid-August and it feels like I’ve spent three months in hiding.
I hardly need to tell you that it has been very hot. Nor that the successive heatwaves have, between wildfires and train crashes, provided confirmation (as if we needed it) that the country is even less able to cope with the heat than our bodies. It has been punitive, a period of survive, not thrive.
I spent most of one music festival sitting in the shade, too sluggish to move and scared of dehydrating in a crowded tent. Barbecues have seemed a sticky, unnecessary faff (it has been a relief to eat meals indoors) and the local lido which is usually my sanctuary has turned unbearable now that it is the only chance of escape for miles. Even the parks, where once I would have spent long, lazy days with a book, are barren dustbowls, tolerable for a few minutes before you’re forced to seek shelter from the oppressive heat.
It’s hard work. What’s even harder, though, is the feeling that I’ve wished away and wasted the very season life’s meant to be in bloom.
It is drummed into us in this country that sunshine is scarce and so we ought to “make the most” of it. As a way of parents forcing children with nothing to do out of the house to play, and then becomes a sort of collective philosophy, it starts, I think. We suffer for months and months of rain and dull, grey days so as to earn this, so to be inside on a nice day is to squander something precious and to opt out of life. You don’t know when you’ll get another.
This is obviously why you’ll catch so many men with their shirts off if there’s a sunny day in March; why we’re so reluctant to leave the beach even if a storm is brewing; and probably why we have an unbecoming reputation for going loopy on holiday. We have an ingrained understanding that it won’t last, and we know we are supposed to drop everything to seize upon it, to make sure we know we did everything we could to have fun and produce memories in that brief, allotted period we’re allowed to.
