Fuck You, Summer 2012!

London in the summer.  This photo isn’t black and white. Photo via

Famous dead writer F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that life only starts in the summer, and if that is the case, then Britain has been in a coma for months. Summer needs constancy to feel like a real season. You’ve got to be able to wake up with the sun’s rays in your eyes every morning for at least ten days straight; otherwise you won’t have any true summer experiences. That’s not summer, that’s a meteorological cock-tease.

So, with my ruined summer behind me, I thought I’d try to inflict some of the sense of loss I’m suffering upon the rest of you. You might think you had a nice summer, but you didn’t, because you didn’t get to do any of these things. Try to remember these imaginary moments when you’re keeping warm up against the Freeview box in January.

SUMMER ROMANCE

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You might have met someone, you might have had someone already, but you can’t have had a real summer romance. You might have turned up to meet a group of people on Hampstead Heath with a bag of Desperados and The Stone Roses, but the fleeting glances you were trading with the one girl there you didn’t know were probably rained off like a badly organised county cricket match before “Bye Bye Badman”.

Summer is the best time to fall in love. Every shared moment with that special person starts to feel like a scene from Adventureland, your skins stick to each other and you both smell like perspiring strawberries. Alas, that wasn’t to be this year. Any romantic narrative of yours would centre instead on phone boxes, chain pubs and Dixon’s doorways. You were soggy from the rain and sweaty from the humidity, like a supermarket sandwich. Your love story was to be more Brief Encounter than True Romance.

SMOKING WEED

Unless you’re the kind of person who thinks your mum is Dufresning the bedroom wall to steal your stash, you’ll probably agree that summer is the best time to smoke weed. In fact, I’d go as far as to say it’s the only time of the year worth smoking it. The green stuff is not a drug conducive to cold seasons. Nobody in their right mind wants to find themselves puffing on a rain-soaked joint by the power generator with a bunch of shivering bros who use the word “man” to bookend their sentences.

Weed is a drug that gives you a sexy, lax feeling – the feeling of staring at the sun for half an hour with your eyes closed. It’s the drug for G-Funk, beers with limes in them and mutual groping. Find yourself bumbling through the local estate after a few tokes three weeks from now and you’ll feel like you’re living in Skinnyman’s second album: a hallucinatory UK hip-hop nightmare where you can’t distinguish your own breath from the smoke.

GOING TOPLESS

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The official start of summer is when you see shapeless white guys with their shirts off on trains. They are our public transport groundhogs. Nothing screams “summer is upon us” quite like back fat losing suction on the plastic bits of a bus seat. That’s the point where I know it’s acceptable to listen to A Tribe Called Quest again.

But this year, those people never came. They couldn’t be sure if they’d end up in a monsoon on the way back from Costcutter, so they stuck to the perforated nylon, leaving the rest of us to dwell in nervous uncertainty.

CRUISING

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Because nobody apart from drug dealers and lawyers own cars in London, cruising is somewhat of a novelty in zones 1 to 6. Come June, however, even if all you’ve got in the way of credentials are the keys to your mum’s hardtop Peugeot 206 and a three-day unwashed sofa depression spent solely in the company of Gran Turismo 3, you’ll suddenly find yourself with your own posse of lowriders. All your male friends will be suggesting that you take it out for a spin across Tower Bridge with a copy of Chronic 2001 and a bottle of Gordon’s and Rubicon. This is because our generation grew up on West Coast hip-hop fantasies that we’ll never be able to recreate. But we can try and there is a joy in that.

Did I get to do this at all this summer? Nope. The best I got was probably sneaking a Kronenbourg on the open-air bit of the District Line, and that didn’t make me feel like Rick Ross in “Aston Martin Music”, it made me feel Australian.

AL FRESCO DINING

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You might complain about the wasps and acoustic guitar wankers next time you’re enjoying a burrito on London Fields (or whatever it is that people who aren’t depressed on Saturdays and Sundays do), but you won’t be in November, when you’re slumped on a damp stool in a chicken shop, desperately trying to keep warm with a creaky polystyrene tray loaded with watery ketchup and chips that taste like loft insulation.

Eating outside makes all food better. It might be horribly bourgeois, but al fresco eating is how eating should be done. It helps you forget you’re only ever ten-feet away from a rat or a depressed restaurant middle manager who is sadboxing the place out with Katie Melua on repeat. Al fresco eating makes anything exotic. Even if it’s a branch of Las Iguanas in Oldham, that mojito and fajita deal can make you feel like you’re shooting the breeze with Castro.

I tried it a few times this summer, but was inevitably thwarted by draconian litter laws and water falling from the skies. I guess it’s another long, hard winter of Pizza Express vouchers and microwave omelettes for me.

COLLECTIVE MISERY

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Usually when it pisses it down all summer, you’ve at least got a whole nation of moaners to share it with. From nice old ladies, to angry youths and tabloid newspaper editors, we’re all united by the “this fucking country” sentiment. We don’t even need to say it to each other; our hatred of our home nation exists as a form of cultural telepathy. Stand at any bus stop from Dalston, East London to Dalston, Cumbria and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Sometimes being British is like being part of a secret society with a covert language of sighs and tuts to communicate our dissatisfaction with the relentless fucking bullshit of living in one of the most powerful and comfortable countries in the world. You don’t need a secret handshake to tell people you hate living here, you just have to live here.

Now, however, the country is wrapped up in a state of delusional, post-Team GB glory. Yes, it was great, but we aren’t in remission yet. We’re a deluded, lovelorn and quite stupid teenager of a country, kidding ourselves that everybody likes us and we’re going to be OK.

So bring on the cold winter, I say. Bring back coats and ales, seasonal affective disorder and public sector strikes. We know how to deal with those. Summer in this country is a thing of the past – a nostalgic fad, like space hoppers and solvent abuse, that Stuart Maconie will be fondly remembering on list shows for years to come. We have to move on and treat summer for what it is. Which is fucking dead.

Follow Clive on Twitter: @thugclive

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