I shall not name the person who today provided me some more urgently needed perspective, but I am very glad s/he did. Someone who was with their family in a lovely place, safe and warm. “Who needs the weather?” they added.
It is easy to get worn down by the British maritime climate which normally offers us different shades of grey. Yes, we do get splendidly sunshiny days that really do lift the spirit and we usually appreciate them when they come along. You can usually write off the British winter because the standard grey is made even more grey by the lack of sunlight. And summer, too, is almost always a letdown.
Take last year, and from July onwards, I wish you had. The most beautiful spring and then a dry but cool June, I was building up to the summer of all summers. And then everything reverted to normal until autumn, and it was all too late by then. I was lucky. I had a holiday in Greece to look forward to. Many didn’t. More important than that, I had family. The former would have not have been much use without the other.
As I am becoming an older person myself, I believe it is my duty to develop selective amnesia when it comes to the weather. Every day of every summer of my childhood was spent in glorious sunshine. We were always in the garden, playing, with the sun on our backs. Every night, as a teenager, at Victory Park in Brislington, playing 15 a side games of football and it was always hot and sunny. Whatever happened to the seasons? But then I remember the times when we couldn’t go out to play football, the rain-ruined caravan holidays in West Bay, usually spent in a caravan owned by a couple called Eric and Grace who were the envy of Broomhill because – and wait for this – they owned, they actually owned their own caravan and let us rent it out. And it rained. It always rained. Bugger. There was me thinking it was sunny all the time. Some, most, years we never went to the beach at all, so awful was the weather. My grandad, the ace weather grouch, would take me to walk along the harbour walls where the waves crashed and splashed, almost sending the moored boats into orbit. And this was in August. It was cold, too, in our little caravan. “Have another burger,” he would say, by way of compensation. That always worked with me.
But, again, I had my family. I’d rather have had them in baking hot sunshine, for sure, but I had them with me, as I no longer do. Perhaps my mind is playing tricks, but they were happy days, crap weather or not.
Wise family members and friends always emphasised you should not fret about things you cannot change. It had not occurred to me one of these my just be the weather. I remember walking in Devon with my dad, sheltering from driving rain and ending up in the pub. In my grandmother’s apartment in Rotterdam, gazing out through thick drizzle at the ersatz football pitch on which I played out my dreams with Gerard and Jackie who lived across the way, waiting for the rain to clear and the whistles to start, calling the local boys to come out to play, like a Dutch sporting Tarzan adventure.
I would rather it never rained, I would rather winter didn’t come at all, that it didn’t get dark for months on end, that it was always warm and sunny. I am sure my mood would improve, until the reservoirs dried out and the crops failed year on year and then I’d be praying – no, not praying: that’s just silly – or better still hoping for a wetter day.
Given the choice, I’d take warm and sunny over cold and wet any day of the week and I always welcome the opportunity to exchange my healthy lily-white skin for an unhealthy brown skin, even though I know that when I am brown I look even older than I already am. I don’t care about that and, to be honest, the warmth of the sun is a luxury I wish for but it’s not the be all and end all. My be all and end all is the people I live with and the people I love. Rain or shine.
