Warm weather is a rare and precious thing in the UK. While most other European countries get at least three months of largely uninterrupted sun and heat, it is not unusual for British Summer Time (aka Shittish Bummer Time) to consist solely of the couple of weeks at the end of May when university students are eyes-deep in exam revision. June, July, and August will then usually be formed of half-hearted attempts at sunshine, grey humidity, and an occasional four-day heatwave during which around sixty per cent of the UK's Magnums are consumed and no one gets any sleep.
Throughout autumn, winter, and spring I moan. I moan because it is cold. I moan because it is raining. I moan because it is both cloudy and humid, and I arrive at work covered in sweat even though the sky is resolutely grey. "I can't wait for summer," I say. "In summer everything will be better. The sky will be blue, and the city will be beautiful, and I will finally be happy. It will be hot and sunny every day. I will look pretty in summer dresses and hang out in parks and go for walks through fields and forests. It will be the best time of year." And every year summer arrives, and every year I remember that summer hates me and I hate it.
Let's pick this fantasy apart item by item, starting with the clothes. I simply do not look pretty in summer clothes. Summer clothes are designed for girls with slim hips, flat tummies, and small breasts. Top-heavy girls named Rowena who love pizza and never go to the gym feel their best in the tights, long sleeves, and high necklines of autumn and winter. For years now my wardrobe has been the same all year round, with tights and cardigans added or subtracted to suit the temperature, but I still foolishly try to alter this winning formula when the clocks go forward. Every year, usually around the start of festival season, I go into Urban Outfitters and pick up a bralette and think, maybe this time? But no, never this time. It always looks bloody awful, just like it did last year. My body has not inexplicably changed the shape it's had since I finished puberty, and I will never look good in a bralette. This is a fact I have to accept, and I'm hoping that putting it in writing publicly will help me give up this foolish annual ritual once and for all.
OK, so I have to swap the summer dress for loose-fitting shorts. The rest of it still stands, right? Bristol certainly does look beautiful under a blue sky; my Instagram account can attest to that. Putting aside the fact that for every blue-sky day we get about two days like the photograph above, the hot and sunny weather we do have presents problems of its own, especially for me. Do you know what doesn't look good in the sunshine? Pale white skin, that's what. Genetics have been kind to me in many ways, and I am hugely thankful to have been born able-bodied, lacking in disfigurements, and generally healthy, but when the necessary melanin to withstand bright sunlight was being handed out I must have been running late. Every time the sun comes out I essentially become a walking disco ball, blinding passers-by with skin so white that it has become reflective. Tanning just doesn't happen to me. I've come back from two-week holidays in hot, sunny countries to find that friends who have stayed in the UK are significantly browner than I am. I have attempted to use fake tan in the past, but the results were just as appalling as every other teenager style choice I made, and therefore don't bear thinking about. My objection to being pale in the summer is not only one of vanity; if I don't slather myself in Factor 50 every thirty minutes or so then I go from my usual strawberries-and-cream complexion (white with patches of red) to full-on flag of China. Not just any Chinese flag, either, but the kind you might expect to find in Tibet, aka burned to a crisp.
On top of being pale, I am also abnormally prone to heatstroke, which certainly adds an interesting element of challenge to day-to-day life when the temperature reaches the thirties. There's nothing quite like sitting down to plan your daily activities and having to put serious thought into how likely it is that you will collapse and die. The most effective way to combat heatstroke, from my personal experience, is to forgo going outside altogether and just live in your bath until the temperature drops to something you can stand. Unfortunately, due to our cruel capitalist society with its 'work' and 'need to eat', leaving the house is sometimes necessary. In this case, I can wholeheartedly recommend buying a portable, battery-powered fan. I purchased one this year completely by accident – the heat had severely impacted upon my ability to read, and I thought I was buying a normal-sized one – and it's now my favourite thing ever. I carry it around with me and sleep with it in my bed. Drinking water constantly is also a must, and I do mean constantly. During a heatwave the only time I am not drinking water is when I am peeing, which is roughly every ten minutes due to the amount of water I'm consuming.
As for spending lots of time outside in parks and forests, I would dearly love to be able to do this. Sadly, my immune system does not share my enthusiasm, and it makes displeasure violently known. I am talking, of course, about hay fever. Hay fever, I am convinced, is plants' revenge for deforestation. Pollen was identified as the cause of allergic rhinitis in the mid nineteenth century, around the end of the event that hit the accelerator on humanity's destruction of the environment: the Industrial Revolution. Coincidence? According to 'reputable sources', yes, but I know the truth. The trees are angry. We hay fever sufferers pay the reparations for their fallen brothers.
If you think hay fever not that big a deal then you have clearly never suffered with it. When mine is at its peak I am unrecognisable. My eyes become so small that I resemble a vole more than a human woman (any attempts at maintaining my make-up during the summer months have long been abandoned), and this is made even more noticeable by my nose doubling in size. Sneezes no longer come in twos but fives and sixes, meaning that the people around me don't know when to say, "Bless you," and there is an awkward silence after every attack as they try to ascertain whether I am done yet. I look revolting. I feel revolting. It takes every fibre of conviction in my body to stop myself from rubbing my eyes frantically for a second, just one short second, of relief from the hellfire that now burns in the upper half of my face. And this is if I remember to take my antihistamine. If I forget then I may as well have bought a dayrider to the ninth circle of Hell. Some kind soul will inevitably take pity on me – because pitiful I truly am – and offer me a tablet, but it is almost always loratadine, which is a garbage drug for people who can afford to wait up to three hours for their entire face to stop itching and leaking. It is at this point that I would welcome a second Ice Age, or at the very least a trip to Dignitas.
All this being said, in spite of summer's unending cruelty towards me, I still wish that we could get along and keep looking forward to it every year. Like a teenager desperate to be friends with the cool group at school even though they're actually horrible people, I turn my nose up at the autumn and spring lovers (sorry, winter, but no one likes you once Christmas is over) and declare myself an ally of summer, even though it clearly hates me and wishes me dead, or at the very least confined to a snotty, sunburned house arrest between May and September. British people know that our summer is made up of sporadic bursts of heat and sun, and it is this fleeting impermanence that gets us outside barbecuing in as little clothing as we can get away with as soon as the clouds part and the thermometer hits the twenties. In the UK we treat summer like a 100-year-old great-uncle; even though he smells funny and most of the things he says are racist, we feel we have to get as much time with him as possible because you don't know when the next time you see him will be.
