Some like it hot to beat the blues

SUMMER may not have arrived just yet, but the past few sunny days have been a welcome break for all those of us chomping at the bit to strip off the winter layers and feel a bit of sunshine on our pasty bodies. I’m assuming you are all as pasty as I am?

After the long, hard winter, the thought of a steaming hot summer, with long, drawn-out nights, sipping G&Ts in the garden seems like a pipe dream. But dream it I do, every year.

I seem to remember last year we had a few fine days around April and again I convinced myself that global warming was not as bad as the doom-mongers would have us believe. What I want it to mean is beautiful weather for the whole of the summer, starting right now.

This year is no different. Apart from the very pleasant interlude of the past few days of sunshine, my ritual was unchanged. The shorts were on, I had all but packed away my parka when the rain came again. Unpack Parka, pack away shorts . . . it’s a habit that I cannot break. All it takes is a couple of brighter days and we here in the UK can’t get enough of beer gardens, sunburn and pretending to ourselves that this is the beginning of a very hot and wonderful season, when really we know that it’s not. It’s just a few nice days in the middle of mostly all right ones.

However, I still cannot wait for the summer. It’s the law in England to ache for the summer and then bemoan it when it never arrives. That’s why foreign holidays were invented. That’s why in the Seventies we discovered Majorca. That’s why we, here in the UK, suffer our dreadful weather because we know that somewhere deep in the heart of the school holidays we will be shoving anything and everything remotely summery into our bulging suitcases and whining at the check-in when they tell us we owe them a thirty quid excess baggage charge.

But, hey, that’s what we Brits are good at. That and getting drunk and sunburnt on our two weeks abroad. So now that package-holiday prices have been slashed due to this credit crunching, I’m assuming that’s where we will all be headed, because you know you can’t guarantee the weather here.

It’ll just be my luck that we will end up sitting on a rainy beach in Greece and the sun will be beaming down on Oldham. Blinking global warming.