Love Sunshine

Season of drizzle and soggy cloudfulness

Well, that blessed season is with us. When we gather in the rosy harvest of our achievements of the year, look back with contentment, and forward with a rather wistful acceptance of the natural order of things, acknowledging that everything has its season, and there is a place for winter as well as joyous spring, and flaming summer. Or, in this case, look back with fuming indignation of being bilked of a summer for 2 years running, and forlorn foreboding of whether we will even be given the booby prize of a least a decent autumn. An Indian summer is the last glimmer of hope for this sun-denuded isle, and this year it is more desperately clung to than ever.

And it's not just me who thinks this. For once I can be assured that I'm not the only prophet of meteorological misery raging on the blasted heath of misguided expectation. Well, if I am, then at least there's a small chorus of Tom 'o Bedlams piping along with me. This week saw me elevated to the status of official pundit on the lousy summer, as the media finally woke up to what I've been banging on about for weeks now, and made this years shocking sunshine record a news item. Yes, I know it's the silly season for news. But this is the silliest version of the season I've ever seen essayed by the celestial architect. Must try harder. Yes, I got to whinge to the Scots, who've had an even worse time of it.
http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.2436887.0.august_a_recordbreaking_washout_says_met_office.php

And then the other day, on the BBC News Magazine: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7513843.stm

I find some of the comments to the last piece (apart from the sun-haters, who are beyond belief), particularly encouraging. I have the small shred of comfort that I at least rant for the nation, and that I'm not the only one suffering from SAD. Not Seasonal Affective Disorder (which, bizarrely I don't have), but Sunshine Allocation Deficit, or Seasonal Atrocity Dementia, which probably amounts to the same thing. If there isn't a spirited attempt to deliver at least an Autumn, then I seriously fear for the nation's mental health.

I've demanded a summer, and lost the cause; I'd settle for an Autumn. I'm working on Keats, after all, and I need to experience the season of mists in all its mellow fruitfulness. The mists I can do without, but bring on the rest please. The irony is (irony being a brave euphemism for simply depressing), that Keats had suffered through three lousy summers in a row. 1816 has gone down in record as the worse summer ever for most of Europe and northern north America (I can't face verifying if last summer here was even worse), and the two after were not much better. He spent most of the spring of 1818 moaning about the rain in Devon, and then spent a summer wading through bogs and being drenched in Scotland. The next year, his final 'living year', was a distinct improvement. So when he wrote what has become the definitive poetic description of late summer, he was celebrating an anomaly, rather than evoking a standard. His poem - for me his finest, and one of the most perfect lyric offerings in the English canon - is a poet's version of 'Phew. What a scorcher!'. And he was simply squeezing the last mellow golden oozings out of a perfect late summer. It is our last hope for something like the same...