What I Miss About the British Summer

“Briefly: this post is by my dear friend and comrade Ella Ward, to celebrate the release of her excellent memoir 27 Letters to My Daughter, in paperback. Ella is a very funny and gifted writer, with a preternaturally cute, magical-forest-being face: if her love-song to British summer touches you, (it nearly made me cry - and I wasn’t even drunk!,) please be sure to check out her book.

Take it away Ella:”

Seven Things I Miss About British Summertime

I’m from Melbourne, a city known for its shit beaches and crap weather. Our winters are cold, our summers are brutal. Thanks to climate change, many of you (unfortunately) know the drill. Melbourne heat can be a raw, wild beast. Despite this we’re brought up to mock the UK’s summer season. I know. We’re jerks. I’m sorry. This Antipodean superiority complex meant I was completely unprepared to find that the very best season in the world is … the British summertime.

I arrived in London in June 2003. It was the furthest I’d travelled from home and I found myself in the middle of a heatwave. I’ve had many summers in England since, and they never fail to take me back to those first enchanted months.

So, as the world boils and freezes and possibly ends; please read these longing words from a winter-bound Australian with a wistful look in her eye. Here are seven things I miss about the British summertime:

1.     Bumblebees. For 21 years I thought a bumblebee was a Disney creation, as mythical as the unicorn. The first time a real one flew past my nose, I nearly wet my pants. ‘It’s the size of a bloody sparrow!’ I shrieked. But now I love them, and their fuzzy bums.

2.     Picnic food from the supermarket. This was a revelation and I lived on party-sized delights until September. Mini pork pies. Oversized strawberries. Crisps in Willy Wonka flavours, if Willy Wonka was Den from Eastenders. You lucky things dine like queens on picnic blankets.

3.     The smells. You won’t like this one. Because yes, the smells are very bad. But sometimes it can help to view your home through someone else’s nostalgic lens. And your city’s perfume has a wonderfully evocative blend. Summer in London is bus exhaust and beer. Puffs of kebab smoke. And of course, the electric-burnt-toast scent of the Tube. If Goop released a Hot Tarmac candle, I’d buy one.

4.     The lack of air-conditioning (bear with me). When Melbourne boils, we scuttle from one icy space to another. You have a country that seemingly doesn’t cool the indoors at all. I worked in unfathomably stuffy offices. Sweated in theatres alive with programs fanning like wings. But with no aircon, people go outside. Pavements hum. Windows are flung open. Which means London in the summer sounds like a city that lives, rather than the drone of a split-system.

5.     A night at the pub with more people outside it, than in. It’s the collective thrill of harmonising with waves of chatter. Of delicately resting your pint on a windowsill, whilst the heat of the day leaks from the bricks below. In Australia if you leave a pub’s boundaries still holding your drink, you’ll be arrested.

6.     The twilight. You know those scenes in sci-fi films where there are two moons? Or just — I don’t know — a purple sun? As an Australian, experiencing a 10pm twilight was utterly alien. Every pink-streaked late-night sunset since has evoked an otherworldly, Pucklike spell. You have magic in your summer skies, you lucky things.

7.     Finally — the marvellous contradiction. The impossibility that it will ever arrive. The understanding that it is here and it may be gone tomorrow. The worry that this is the last special one. It is the heady, intoxicated joy of it all.

~ This article was first published on Esther’s excellent substack The Spike ~