Too hot to be cheerful

When you wake up to BBC breakfast telly warning you intently about the oh so deadly and underestimated dangers of artificial tanning even I have to reluctantly admit that the summer appears to be on its way. People around me completely unprompted screech “yay summer isn’t it luffffly” to which I force a smile upon my aching face and sort of agree “yes?”

I am a big fan of winter clothes. I love scarves and jumpers and boots and tights and woollen hats. Where are those now? I prefer the common cold to hay fever, blue fingers to red shoulders and mulled wine to ice cream. Furthermore why do people suddenly smell so bad? Is there any excuse for smelling really, really bad while travelling in the packed tube? I remember the signs in the busses saying “no smelly food” can we have the same for people? And what on earth are summer clothes anyway? I prefer the general public neatly wrapped up and muffled by layers and layers of fabric.

I am not really a fan of summer. We have been through this before. I despise swimming. Seriously, what is it with swimming? Why??? My going-south-towards-even –higher-amounts-of-heat has to be carefully planned around a film festival. I want the option to escape to somewhere where it is cold, dark and more interesting than the beach.

Literature gets a very bad deal out of summer. Why are beach-reads a genre in the first place and why are they what they are? Now I have nothing against some mind numbing romantic reads that make Jane Austen look like Thomas Pynchon but why would anyone ever consider reading them? This once you have time to really spend time with a book, more than your twenty minutes hanging from a public transport rail and those ten minutes fighting sleep with the book on your pillow at night. Now I am really lying my way through this argument because I am not a great reader and I walk to work. Not a great reader is a bit harsh, I am a very slow reader. So if I ever wanted to read Infinite Jest or let’s say Gravity’s Rainbow (just to stick with Austen) I would do that on my holiday.

I can still picture the last time I was at the lake side with my family. There are my sisters in bikinis bathing in the sun, there are my parents drinking coffee in the beach cafe and that in the shadow under the tree with the clothes on reading Midnight's Children that’s me. Leave me alone I did my half hour alibi swim and I promise to do another before we go home. I spoke to Chuck Palahniuk that summer so I won the coolest holiday person award in the end. (The golden blue plastic cow for coolest holiday person it was, obviously!)