Summer is now officially over and who laments its passing? Some may rhapsodise about the period between June and September, but for many of us, it is a hiatus and trial, the period of the year we most dread. It’s the bill for autumn and winter, the season we’d live better without.
The pavements of cities seem to fizz and reek, your feet balloon in work shoes, the underground turns into a cattle truck
I cannot understand why so many people like summer. It unites some truly awful things: nocturnally whining mosquitoes, hot, sleepless nights, oozing sweat, high blood pressure, and above all, bright, unforgiving light, so you feel you’re constantly being observed in some bizarre lab experiment by hostile scientists. The pavements of cities seem to fizz and reek, your feet balloon in work shoes, the underground turns into a cattle truck and no amount of ‘refreshing drinks’ (soft drinks are like alcohol – one invariably leads to another) ever seems enough.
And just what do you wear if you’re a man? Most of us look better with layers of clothes, just as most walls look better painted. I can rock an overcoat but not a t-shirt, desert boots but not sandals, and then there’s the permanent dilemma of shorts. All men know that, after the age of about 30, shorts are unforgivable, one of those frequently recurring ‘don’ts’ in style columns that niggles away at you. If you’re Mediterranean and tan walnut-style you can just about carry it off – you look vaguely like a mahogany tallboy with hair. Otherwise, there is nothing advantageous to the world about the sight of a middle-aged man’s knees. You end up resembling an Akela in search of a scout brigade. Rolf Harris out on a field trip. And yet we carry on doing it, toying with the idea of compromising with those mid-shin models people sneer at. We think we look piratical or edgy beach-bum. Other people are reminded of the puppets from Button Moon.
It is alright for the beautiful people. They make us suffer all year with their unattainability, but the summer is really their apex of power (think Stalin in 1937 or Tony Blair just after Diana’s death). I’ve done my out-of-hours research here and have found, statistically, there’s a clear weighting towards the summer months among people who are above-average attractiveness. And why wouldn’t there be? Why wouldn’t you want to take your clothes off when it garners you even more adulation? When you are truly gorgeous, man or woman, clothes are just an irritation, a necessary inconvenience for nine months of the year. Get ‘em off and raise that sweltering temperature some more!
Meanwhile the rest of us skulk in the shadows, in our moob and pot-covering cardigans, bullied and humbled yet knowing that to dislike summer is effectively to be anti-life itself. It’s like being against carnivals, cocktails or Abba’s Greatest Hits. The reason I have never wanted to set foot in Australia is that I imagine it’s one permanent uninterrupted summer there, in which everyone knows how to fire up a barbecue, the unclothed people are even more hard-bodied and the bugs are ten times bigger and more deadly. Sorry Australian readers, if you’re currently staring out of your windows into a blizzard or hailstorm, I have clearly got it wrong. Blame Jason and Kylie: two model children of the summer if ever you saw them.
It’s bred into us from an early age that the summer is the year’s pay-off time. Eight-week holidays when you’re a child. Trips to the beach or lido. Danny and Sandy making out to ‘Summer Lovin’ in Grease. Ferris Bueller roaring down the road in his friend’s father’s Ferrari with the top down, on his epic (summer) ‘day off’. At the end of Trading Places, lying on a Caribbean beach with a pina colada is the ultimate reward, the adult equivalent of the slap-up meal at the end of a Beano comic strip, all mountainous mashed potatoes and half-submerged chipolatas. Which is how the summer makes so many of us feel.
It is a young person’s season, when you’re still convinced that with a few minor alterations and a bit of effort you could turn into Jon Bon Jovi or Bruce Willis. It’s as we realise, over time, that looks-wise we’re more like Jon Ronson or Bruce Forsyth and always will be that the rot sets in. We could still be beach-body ready with some gruelling work, but we lack the time, energy or faith. I once, for a few weeks, had a washboard stomach. I even paid to get an electric suntan and told the requisite lies to my workmates (‘Fell-asleep-in-the garden-I-just-tan-so-easily-me’). Neither brought anything of genuine value into my life. Why do it again? Best to shelter inside with the curtains drawn and a floor-fan on 24-7 and wait it out for mid-September. I have asked myself at times whether I would sign up to hibernate between late May and October, if such a thing were on offer. Could I swallow the years it would shear off my life? Yes, dammit, I could. And a happy autumn to everyone.
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