CELEBRITY STYLE SPY: See all the latest celeb photos

Read the latest from Marie Claire columnist Chris Addison

By Chris Addison on Thursday 7 July 2011

Print
Share
Comment

Chris Addison

It’s that time of year again. The music royalties are rolling in for Mungo Jerry and Will Smith thanks to the withered imaginations of the people who programme Radio 2, and anytime now there’ll be the annual five clear minutes where there’s no sodding football. In short, it’s summer. And if you’re British that can mean only one thing: PANIIIIIC!

The summer of adverts and childhood memories is long, hot, relaxed. It’s full of cold drinks, washed out colours and (help me, Lord) girls in floaty white dresses. In it we drift effortlessly from the warm breeze of our bedrooms to picnics with friends and the jasmine and fag smoke of a verdant pub garden.

Hold on a minute. This memory is a lie. For the British, summer is more: Ohmygodohmygodohmygod. Summer! Quick! What if we miss it? We must do everything summery we possibly can at once! Now! Right, you get the Orla Kiely beach bag with the Nivea stains on it, I’ll see if I can dig out last year’s mouldy flip-flops from under the stairs. Stacey’s got half a bottle of flat Lambrini in her cupboard, we’ll take that. Where’s the nearest grassy space? The side of the A580? Perfect. Never mind the precipitous incline, we’ll tether ourselves to those plastic tubes they put round roadside saplings. Meet you there – we’re going to sit on it without cardies and ENJOY OURSELVES.

We British make ourselves utterly miserable trying to ensure we don’t miss the opportunity to have a summery time. It’s insane. During the unseasonably warm March this year I was walking through a busy London street at ten in the morning when I spied two idiots walking about in board shorts and flip-flops. March. They were trying not to look cold and like they’d made a dunderheaded decision but they couldn’t have looked more out of season if they’d been dressed as Father Christmas. Of course it wasn’t really their fault; they’re like hedgehogs who wake too early to find any food – betrayed by generations of instinct meeting an unexpectedly sunny day and condemned to freeze. Their British bodies were screaming at them, ‘NOW! Get the Kermit-smoking-dope T-shirt out. This could be it till next August.’

And that’s the problem of course: fear. The fear that the summer will be so brief that we might miss it. So we approach the season as though we were doing The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award: if we haven’t completed our internal checklist of ‘fun’ summertime activities we will have failed. But if all the boxes are ticked and the photos taken then, even though achieving it all in two days was hell, we’ve got our badge and can sort of reconstruct a nice time afterwards using a combination of booze, false memory syndrome, Photoshop and Never Speaking Of This Again. Some of us are so good at this now that we can practically get summer done in under four hours. I know people who can inflate a paddling pool with one foot and mix Pimm’s with the other at the same time as tipsily strumming a guitar.

Naturally enough, it always goes wrong in the end. Nothing says ‘nine hours from now you will be lying awake with a pillow over your head while your drunken, screaming neighbours bellow each other’s shortcomings till one of them has to go to A&E to have the bamboo wind chime removed’ like the smell of freshly lit charcoal wafting over the fence. Still, at least autumn will be here again soon. By which I mean the weekend. Mmmm, have a great summer.