Seasons Weepings

The Blogfather...

You'll be pleased to know I had a charming weekend, spending most of it in my deckchair overlooking Reservation Towers, with a knotted hankie on my forehead and wearing a string vest covered in vinegar stains from pickled eggs consumed over 12 hours sat in persistent drizzle.

It got a bit alarming when two care workers were dispatched by the council to smile at me cautiously and ask “If I was ok” in patronisingly cheery tones, before I shooed them from my roof terrace with a cricket bat. I was merely enjoying the freezing weather as only a patriotic Hercules and borderline alcoholic can.

I’ve always considered June to be the start of summer and thoughts turn to walking through the gardens of stately homes while unshaven, flat capped grounds keepers wielding multi-barrelled shotguns, shout unintelligible threats about walking on the paths and not picking the Hydrangeas. Images flash across my mind of never ending bike rides down steep country hills, staying out past nine o’clock and the taste of barbecued meats followed by the sound of uncontrollable retching and the satisfying ‘plop’ as hunks of undercooked sausage repatriate themselves from gullet to toilet bowl like a ten year old hitting a belly flop from the high diving board.

In this country we have a shared understanding and disappointment regarding the seasons which is often discussed nervously by people stuck in awkward social situations. Who among us hasn’t passed the time during, say, a chance meeting at the water cooler, the gathering round a fatal accident or the aftermath of a mugging, by politely discussing Mother Nature’s unwillingness to provide Britain's with slightly less hail?

People often speculate as to why the Brits talk so much about the weather, but it’s not that surprising because it’s always on the change, morphing from one partially recognisable state to another, before you’ve even had chance to check if you remembered your brolly.

Helpfully, people from previous generations often remind us (normally in the manner of wise sages issuing Caesar a grim warning to watch out for the Ides. Nothing more dangerous than an Ide. More dangerous than a Lion with a broken bottle... Sorry, I digress) about weather they remember from their youth and how bloody brilliant it was. Yes. That’s right. Even historical weather gets a good going over. Well, great. Let’s all get on board the fun bus and have a good old chat about historical weather. Parp, Parp.

To hear it told, this was a golden age, when summers lasted exactly the 6 weeks of the school holidays and were so hot, the oven was turned on to cool the house down, you could fry eggs on your nipples and lambs spontaneously combusted in the fields before being scooped up from the ground into pita bread and scoffed on the beachfront. Winters, in turn, were semi-arctic with great drifts of snow blocking in pensioners and marauding Yetis were hunted in the hills by SAS marksmen.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that indulging in imagined wonderment at historical weather might possibly be a cathartic exercise to purge us of our jealousy of the really nice stuff the rest of Europe seems to enjoy. Either that, or the frame of reference has simply changed. A beautiful summer forty years ago probably involved a trip to Margate, a dip in the brine, then back behind the windbreak before your eyes turn blue. Nowadays a good summer is judged by a previous Majorcan getaway, where it was so hot your entire body evaporated, leaving only a thin mist and the smell of BO and Ambre Solaire where you once stood.

I don’t put much stock by these rememberings of extreme conditions because it’s amazing how selective the brain hole can be. I can remember as many rainy days as sunny when I was a kid and frankly it didn’t bother me too much. It just meant a day kicking lumps out of pixelated Spectrum footballers on Kick Off 2 rather than playing “knock and run” or being bullied at the local park. The myth of summer never amounts to much more than shop windows displaying skin tight hot pants instead of woolly-pully’s, advertising agencies finding legitimate reasons to reduce their adverts to semi-pornographic levels by stripping the female models down to thong bikinis and people finding increasingly grim excuses to hang out the back of the pub with the fag ends, dog turds and frenetic kids, rather than huddled round a storage heater praying for the lock in at the Onion and Weasel.

This year there does seem to be an unhealthy number of tight shorted, floppy fringed morons around, looking like gay lumberjacks engaging in a battle as to who can look the most mentally incompetent whilst at the same time maintaining a galactic level of smug self-satisfaction that would make Fearne Cotton blush (as an aside, you know what they say; you can’t spell “Fearne” without FEAR. You also can’t spell “Cotton” without wanting to stop writing “Cotton” and instead go round to her house and push her face into an industrial belt sander, but that’s for another time...). It’s still raining, it’s still windy, but the sunglasses remain in place and I have to restrain myself from hurling concrete blocks from my window and watching these preening foreskins dodge them like little Asos froggers.

I think that, as a nation, we need to break free of the tyranny of an imagined summer that never happens and be bloody thankful for the nice days that we do get. Drizzle adds nice depth to a beautiful view, so it shouldn’t stop us doing what we want anyway. It doesn’t matter. In 50 years we’ll all be underwater anyway and all that will be left to moan about will be who gets the last lilo.

LoveisthedrugandIneedtoscoreooohohohcan’tyouseeloveisthedrugforme xx