And so farewell to the sunniest spring ever, the driest May for 46 years, with unbroken, often warm sunshine for days and weeks on end. Here, at last, comes summer. Guess what happens next? I suspect the endless waves of sunshine have now ended, possibly for summer.
Today could well be the last day where many thousands of seemingly unhinged townies arrive en masse at a popular beach and ignore social distancing on an industrial scale. From tomorrow, it’s going to get cooler and wetter. Life, at least in once sense, will return to normal.
We are often fooled by the merry month of May. Almost always, it seems to me, the weather is fantastic, if your idea of fantastic is sunny and dry. We speculate that we may have another 1976, the year that Britain sweltered in scorching hot sunshine for weeks, months, on end. Then, reality kicks in and the weather man on the telly stands in front of a chart with lots of lines on it and words like ‘low’, meaning low pressure with lots of wind and rain.
At least the garden will be happy, we mutter crossly as we put the garden furniture back in the shed. In some ways, I am looking forward to it as well. The scenes at beaches, the five mile queues at IKEA, the crowded parks – well, they won’t be happening any time soon. Dominic Cummings won’t need to remind his ministers to tell people to stay at home, even if he doesn’t. They’ll be sheltering at home, putting on their winter woollies, closing the windows that have been open for months.
With eight million people furloughed and being paid to sit around doing nothing, as well as the parents being stuck at home with children with no schools to go to, it is no wonder we’ve seen such crazy crowded scenes. And many of those gallivanting around the land in search of a beach would otherwise have been abroad, seeking the sun elsewhere. As the summer ends as soon as it starts, I suspect there will be a lot of bored people.
I’m that unique person whose childhood was spent in an endless summer. The old black and white photos show nothing but clouds and rain. I don’t remember summers being much better back in the day, although I do know they weren’t quite so extreme. The only extreme this summer, I suspect, will be extreme boredom.
The coming bad weather will come at the same time as the economy staggers uncontrollably into the deepest recession of our lifetimes. Those photographs on social networks with people showing off their lazy, crazy days of summer will slowly fade away.
The gorgeous spring was a beautiful illusion. Slowly, but surely, our new reality of a changed world will sink in. A summer of sitting in pub gardens might not happen after all, we may end up eating in for the foreseeable future, looking out at the rain beating against our windows.
