I Hate Summer

Today it is the First Day of September, and Thank God for That. A sharp pair of eyes may draw your attention to the fact that the preceding sentence contains a few extraneous capitals, and that is because it deserves them. My name is Lindsay, and I hate summer. There, I said it. It is an opinion greeted with about as much incomprehension as that of, say, not liking kittens (I don’t, they are horrible little scratchy psychopaths), or having no desire to watch Glee (call me slow-witted, but I fail to get the irony). Aestiphobia, it seems, is a word entirely made-up, just then, by me. Typing it into Google directs one instead to research ‘vestiphobia,’ the apparently far less improbable fear of clothing.

To say I have a phobia of summer is certainly over-stating the matter. That would have caused me to chop off my own head many Mays ago. But physiologic and psychological maladies haunt me throughout the Dog Days. The Romans had the right idea, sacrificing a dog to Sirius every year, in the (sensible) belief that this was an evil time, when animals and humans became languid, and indeed, went a bit mental.

Seasonal Affective Disorder is generally held to refer to those influenced by the lack of sunlight in winter causing them to get a bit miserable during these months. I have the opposite form of seasonal woe. Ask anyone. But aside from this, physical weaknesses plague me during the summer. My asthma is exacerbated by heat and humidity, and I have a rather pathetically Celtic kind of photosensitivity, causing an unsightly and uncomfortable rash upon sun exposure. So to avoid this I wear jeans and long sleeves all summer, and have to put up with the consequences. That is, being a bit warm. Not wanting to come across as self-pitying, I would like to acknowledge that I am by no means alone in my suffering. Plenty of people hate the summer, for whatever reason. But to voice one’s antipathy towards the season is running the risk of being accused of trying to ruin it for everybody else. I can hate it all I like – it is not going to go away – so why the hell do I not have the right to attest to my aversion in public?

Newsreaders take astonishingly unoriginal pleasure in complaining, during the summer, about the rain, or the fact that the temperature is nineteen degrees, when linking to or from the weather forecast. North West Tonight presenter Gordon Burns particularly infuriates me on this count. He behaves as though the perfectly seasonal precipitation level is some kind of personal slight to him and his God-given right to be forever basking in the rays of his munificent protector Ra. I encountered Gordon Burns a few times recently, and his supposed solar obsession seems incongruous with his demeanour. He has the deportment of the butler of a haunted castle. Instead of walking, he appears to hover, and with a slight stoop. I just cannot imagine him genuinely wanting to do karaoke to “Club Tropicana” in Benidorm.

No. Summer, and heat, and drought, are not nice things. Ask any desert-dweller. What are nice are the misguided imaginings of the warm season which one experiences during the winter. I look forward to pleasantly balmy days as much as the next person, days I imagine will be spent drinking cool lager in a beer garden, or on medieval cobbles. But then, come summer, I do this about twice. The image of continental pavement cafés peopled with smartly dressed folk smoking Café Cremes is replaced by the reality of the pottery shire horses, and perpetually semi-drunk, unemployed and retired gents of my local. And my invariably getting sun-burnt and sleepy.

Summer is of course a manifestation of nostalgia. Firstly of the individual’s nostalgia for a childhood, in which summer days playing on rope-swings over babbling brooks are all that survives the intervening years of memory loss. The hours of tedium sitting in a hot car going to another castle, or the constant bullying from one’s siblings, go largely forgotten.

Secondly, there is the collective nostalgia of shared culture. I have never been boating with either a man in a striped blazer, or with woodland creatures. Nor have most people. Indeed, the closest I have come to it was a row on Crewe Park boating lake, with a selection of teenagers in Dr Martens and oversized pullovers. Most likely followed by cider in a hedge (quite pleasant and rustic-sounding, I suppose). I suspect to the city or large town dweller, the association of summer and the countryside are of greater significance. Summer suggests a simpler time of Thomas Hardy novels, home-made jam, and picnics of boiled eggs and enormous hams. But, I ask you: Did the Famous Five ever get stung by wasps in their pastoral idyll? Well, no they didn’t, because they too were living in a non-existent world of nostalgia, where the past’s negative connotations could be forgotten. I was dimly aware of this as a child. I knew that my enjoyment of the books was down to some kind of false longing for a life I did not have, but I also realised that even at the time of their being written, they were probably seen as rather wistful in their portrayal of England.

So, one’s individual nostalgia, and a shared, cultural nostalgia get tangled up to make a self-perpetuating myth. When I come out as admitting to hating summer, I am in fact trampling on the collective need to hark back to better days. A need I completely fail to understand, since desperately clinging to a perceived time of former glory, is surely a defeatist admission that nothing is ever going to be as sunny and glorious ever again, so let’s all just give up now. Well, that is the whole point of nostalgia, I suppose. Since it can only be seen in retrospect, can it really do any harm to dwell on it a little too much? As soon as one actually becomes aware that one is in an enjoyable situation, it loses its agreeableness. So, does that make nostalgia the only true form of pleasure? Looking back at a time when we were perfectly happy, without it having been ruined by self-awareness? No, because it is only when in a situation of discontent that nostalgia starts to take over the thoughts. Only some level of current misery can give rise to the need to idealise another time – a time generally limited to the past by the inadequacies of imagination. Anyway, this is digressing somewhat.

The corollary of the argument of the cult of summer being due to collective nostalgia is that I could just as easily be accused of looking at winter with rose-tinted, or more probably frosty-silvery-blue-tinted-glasses. The obvious principal attraction of winter is Christmas, but as an adult this is more of an anti-climax than any sunny day of boozing out-of-doors. However, there are elements of winter that can be pretty much relied on: clear-aired frosty mornings, and evenings which are dark by half-past four (the dark makes me feel like I can go about my business un-scrutinised, which has always seemed hugely comforting. Does that make me sound like a serial killer?) Coats. I love coats. And knitwear, and boots, and gloves, and scarves. (Wow, I really do sound psychotic; just how many layers of disguise do I need to hide behind?) But perhaps the most decadent article of cold-weather equipment ever created is the feather quilt. If the feather quilt is not evidence enough for the superiority of winter over summer, I don’t know what is.

I realise that this is all a little subjective, and self-indulgent. But my point is, that it should not be socially unacceptable to air an opinion expressing a sense of realism about the hideousness of overly-hot summers. When the mercury’s been above 25 degrees for a few days, everybody complains. Some of us just have a more realistic memory of what the feeling of it being a bit too hot is actually like.