In 1974, The Beach Boys, or rather their old record label, released a compilation called Endless Summer. It’s a decent enough record, and only about £2 on Amazon, except perhaps for the obsessives, like me, who mourn the absence of scores of their classic songs. By accident or design, the title, Endless Summer, resonates with those of us who, somewhat sadly, yearn for summer and dread the passage into autumn and then winter. If only we could really have an endless summer.
These days, I pay little attention to dates, but today’s, 31st August, is one I always note with a degree of sadness. Because on the meteorological calendar this is the last day of summer. It’s all downhill from here.
Not that the date itself affects the weather overnight. I will not wake up tomorrow and immediately note a significant difference. Weather doesn’t work like that. But if I look at the Bristol sunset charts, I see that tonight the sun sets before 20.00, or 8.00 pm as it’s better known for the first time in ages (I am too lazy to look up the actual date.). Those long, light evenings during which we have watched the rain fall continuously on our green and pleasant land are slowly being replaced by short, dark evenings that will soon begin shortly after lunch.
I am not really complaining about the weather. It is, as we say in modern parlance, what it is. And I am not one of those who complains that “we don’t get seasons anymore”, having married a keen gardener who enthusiastically points out the subtle changes that occur. Indeed, I learned that “we don’t get seasons anymore” is a dreary old cliché trotted out by the same people who assert, with little or no evidence, that everything was better in the old days, especially the weather.
The dream of the endless summer is clearly shared by very many of us, which is why we jet off to warmer climes as the British temperatures start to fall even further. In the deep midwinter, I will find myself far happier to be enjoying a pint of Estrella in a Canary island bar than a pint of foaming ale in a traditional English boozer.
The endless summer, which never really got started this year, comes to a technical end today and from tomorrow we will be sweeping leaves from the drive and dressing with an extra layer of warm clothing. The salads of summer will be replaced by hearty soups and stews and we will soon be wandering through Tesco cursing the Christmas products that are already on sale. (In fact, I heard a report just this week that mince pies were already available for purchase. Shocking.)
Wishing my life away – which is wrong on all levels – I now start the countdown to the next meteorological spring, which begins on 1st March 2025, always assuming I have not slipped off my mortal coil by then.
In the meantime, can I make one request of our so-called leaders that they stop this annual nonsense of changing the clocks which makes it darker, earlier for the entire winter for no obvious reason at all, other than the fact we started doing it World War One? Or if we must change the clocks, can we please have summer time all winter and double summer time all summer?
The dream of the endless summer is just that, but without dreams, what are we?