Why I Hate the Summer

To some, Summer is all skittles and beer. For me, it’s all crowds, oppressive heat, and endless days of interminable brightness. Bring on winter!

I accept that in this respect I am pretty weird, but Summer makes me depressed.

Not clinically depressed in the medical sense.

Just a bit blue.

It also makes me very hot and bothered.

Interminable heat

The first thing is the interminable heat. As climate change takes its toll, we in Britain are increasingly sweltering in the thirties and we don’t typically have air conditioning installed everywhere as in the US. So, we have to suffer in silence as our ill-equipped infrastructure groans in the swelter.

Even when there is air conditioning, you can’t help but feel guilty — what is all that energy doing to the electricity grid, and how its it affecting global warming?

Anyway, has anyone noticed how much easier it is to warm up than cool down? That’s an endorsement for chilly snowy days if ever there was one. You can walk down the street in a thick duffle coat, woolly jumper and gloves, but you can’t parade down the avenue in your altogether dousing yourself with cold water as you have ditched all your clobber to catch the unreliable cooling breeze.

Beyond that, I keep tropical freshwater fish, and I find myself having to drop endless small PET bottles full of ice water into the tank to keep the temperature down. It’s highly inconvenient.

Enduring brightness

The next thing is the long, bright days. It’s impossible to have a proper night’s sleep without blackout curtains. There are those who live in the far North who say they get depression in winter when the days are so short.

For myself, I love those short snappy days that start at eight am and finish at four pm. There’s something magical about proceeding with your day in the dark gloaming that really raises my spirits.

Crowds and smells and suntan cream

Summer brings out smelly crowds and the odour of spilled ice creams, stale hot dogs and fizzy drinks.

Who wants to wade through sticky dry puddles of God-knows-what and sidle up to sweating people who smell (because of the heat) as though they haven’t washed in a week even though they probably have.

And, then again, you have to remember to douse yourself with swathes of suntan cream, which after an hour or so becomes sticky and smelly and attracts bugs which attach themselves to it like flypaper.

Even the trees are tired by mid-Summer

I love trees, and the joy of trees in bright light-green full leaf in Springtime is a joy to behold.

By mid-Summer, however, the trees are increasingly tired. Starved of water, their leaves turn a darker hue of green as they complain about their arid plight.

Like me, they seem to wilt in the heat, and they look joyless in the August sunshine.

Maybe I should move to Scotland?

I have a good friend whom I share all this with from time to time, especially when it is hot.

She tells me London is the wrong place for me and that I should move to Scotland.

Well, notwithstanding the fact I play the bagpipes and in many respects would enjoy living in Scotland (not least because of the weather) I love London too much to consider moving just because I hate the Summer.

After all, it’s only three months each year.

What I do instead, when I can’t sleep because of the early-morning brightness and the muggy tropical nights, is day-dream of a crisp, cold winter evening that makes your toes curl and incites a desire for hot buttered toast and a steaming chocolate drink laced with a tot of rum.

Occasionally I will gaze at a Christmas card of a snowy scene and remind myself that Summer is only a transient phase and it will soon be Autumn again.

Roll on October, and the joys of winter.

As Taylor Swift says:

I love the scents of winter! For me, it’s all about the feeling you get when you smell pumpkin spice, cinnamon, nutmeg, gingerbread and spruce.

I shall keep my mittens and a pinch of nutmeg by my bed over the Summer as a reminder.

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