Summer's Here and Everyone's Looking for New Sex

After the first day of sun, I went to a friend’s birthday in a pub. We’d all taken our coats off for the first time in eight months that day, and some stuff had come loose, a bit like emotional sediment. Somebody was jealous that his girlfriend’s ex was in the room, and he tried to swallow the feelings, but it made him go boss-eyed. "She’s with you now!" I wanted to cry out, "Just be excellent and love each other, your beauty will make the ghosts dissolve like a bath of acid!" But I couldn’t be arsed, so I had another drink instead and just let him stand there feeling needlessly shit.

Another couple who had broken up some weeks ago spent the evening angrily talking to each other and then angrily going home together, one leading the other away by the angry hand. Oi oi. Someone else drank enough that they just needed to lie down for a minute on the cool, tiled floor. I felt like I was smoking a hundred cigarettes in a row just to give my lungs something harder to do. Then the cigarettes ran out. The room was full of sex and storm. Everybody was trickling their way into tropical, and going mad. It was wonderful. I had another drink. And then another one to keep the first ones company.

A man I didn’t know sat on a chair and the chair fell over with him in it. He was bewildered, everyone looking up to see what the noise was, the noise being the chair landing on some glasses and smashing them. He got up, putting it upright again, ignoring the mess beneath it. His friend refused to believe that a chair could just do that like that, so he too sat down in it. When it surged over with him too, he landed on my foot. I protested on behalf of my foot. “I’m sorry about your foot,” he said. “This chair,” said the first guy, shaking his head, ”makes no sense.”

Personally, all I ever wanted to be was hot, but summer can be a disconcerting thing to the pasty white aboriginal of England, which I also am. And to people who don’t fit that description but who have come to share the same unease. There’s a winter’s worth of guilt that you can no longer wrap up in a scarf. Look, there’s your neck! You’re answerable for it now. You were safe in the dark, in the cold, in your six layers of synthetic wool wrapping you up against the permafrost. You were getting ready to spend the rest of your life inside your coat, and now there’s no coat. Despite complaining about the weather every day forever, you aren’t quite ready to be a thing of skin.

There are pub gardens, though – and this is the answer to the sun, to drink it up. There are garden parties and barbecues – the answer there is to drink it up, too. And there is the park; full of babies with their bottles and boobs, and nearby tramps suckling hard on their mother’s Special Brew. This is what us pasty people do. We drink, with the excuse of the weather, in all weathers. When it’s cold, you have a whisky to warm you up. When it’s hot, you have a beer to cool you down. When your mood is sagged by a day of unglamorous labour, you drink a glass of wine to leverage you into the mood of somebody who doesn’t have to work for a living.

In the park near me there are always dogwalkers paid to exercise eight assorted beasts, all sniffing each other’s arses from the wrong height, like a boyband gone wrong, the neat trim poodle the colour of a mocha coffee, the Alsatian jumping on the others like he thinks he’s hard and then running away, the Springer Spaniel trying to hump a passing pug. (I would vote for this boyband. I’d put them in my final ten.) There’s somebody playing power ballads on their phone. There’s a man eating a banana from Tupperware and putting the peel back in. There’s a group of beautiful young people who love each other and you wonder how they all organised being available together like this.

And then you wonder what to do with yourself in the park. You should probably take a Frisbee. Ideally, the Frisbee will make you feel silly, when you throw it and catch it and miss, so you will then need a drink. And if you’re lucky enough that you can stay out drinking on a fine summer’s day for long enough, you will even need a coat.

Follow Sophie on Twitter: @heawood

Previously – East London Is Killing Me