Love Sunshine

2009-11-06T13:55:00.003Z

Naked ambition
Or, the lengths you have to go to to promote a book

Yes. I’ve been negligent. Can you blame me? And this is probably a fleeting visit, impelled by an opportunity too good to miss. I’ve been silent for good reasons. Yet another lousy summer has broken my heart, my will and sealed my gob. There’s only so much moaning even I can do about the weather. 3 pants summers in a row, and I admit defeat, and start to wonder if my book, my blog, my very provocative existence in these sunless isles (sunless in summer that is, which, in my rather nostalgic unreasonableness I maintain the outmoded delusion that this might be the proper season for it), is not contributing to the vile weather pattern that has now set in. And so, I’ve stopped blogging a dead horse, and kept schtum.

Why am I breaking cover and radio silence, now? Because, my friends, I’ve been asked to give a talk about my poor book at the British Naturist Association’s annual beano at a leisure complex somewhere in the north of these isles next weekend, and I thought this is something to share with you.

Talking of which, and you are no doubt ahead of me here, what else am I planning to share? It’s a fair question, given, one of the techniques of conquering nerves about public speaking is to ‘imagine the audience naked’. Not very helpful here, given they will be (potentially 400 of them). Do I imagine them clothed, or do I take the plunge myself, and make my first nude appearance since I essayed it as an amateur streaker all them years ago? I have given the matter much thought. At least 2 seconds worth. It would be rude not to.

Watch this space...(no, that one, what are you like?).

2009-07-05T11:51:00.011+01:00

Et in Suburbia Ego

The heatwave (the glorious, glorious heatwave, which is only just petering out) has allowed me to open a door I've been itching to unlatch for 2 years now. I wanted to go somewhere special when researching my chapter on Memory. But, as Joni put it, clouds got in the way. This is what I wrote anyway:

"The past is indeed a foreign country. They have much better weather there.

My earliest fully-formed memory: I was four, and supposed to be meeting my mother outside the school gates. She was a few minutes late, and I took the opportunity to sneak into the allotment next door. Strictly out of bounds. But the door was ajar, and the temptation strong. I can still recall the ecstasy of tearing through the sun-drenched groves of sky-high scarlet beans and lavender, chasing cabbage whites that tumbled from my grasp into the impossible blue beyond. Most of all, I recall the sensation of being energized by the sun. A photosynthetic surge that intoxicated me then, and ever since.

I don’t remember how I got out. Maybe an angel with a flaming sword expelled me and shut fast the door; for, on being retrieved, I apparently declared to my frantic mother that what I had found there was ‘paradise’. I stand by that claim. For I must have felt instinctively the transformative power of sunshine. Its alchemical ability to turn the humblest patch of suburban verdure into the Elysian Fields, and how it can preserve and sanctify moments from our pasts. If I didn’t know it then, I certainly know it now, and can view this moment as formative in my heliotropic quest. A version of the oldest journey of all – to get back to the Garden".

And that's exactly what I did, the scorcher finally allowing me to unlock this sensual time capsule, and see if it was still there. I'd fully expected a George Orwell coming up for air, and down to earth, experience of discovering my paradise had been paved over long ago. With good reason. What used to be a hospital right next to the allotment had just become 'des res' apartments as even Thornton Heath near Croydon pretends it's part of London. So maybe my bid to get back to the Garden was just in time. The door was shut this time, and I couldn't see a soul working there through the chainlink fence. I prowled the perimeter, and was ready to frame the the phrases that made a poetic virtue of this disappointing necessity. But then I spotted an amiable looking old cove sweating towards the gate with a bunch of recently unearthed onions. I think he could see on my face that I was telling the truth about why I wanted to be there. And so he let me in. To rove through the dusty tracks of lost time, searching for the gold I had buried long ago.

And it was there. Miraculously and sunnily still there, just as I'd left it almost 40 years ago. I suppose it's not all that surprising that the allotment remained unchanged. That's sort of what they, and nature and stuff are for. Bucolic oases, whose cyclical continuity defy the flux and sprawl of 'progress' beyond their borders. And I'd come at the same time of year (high summer, but still term time), same time of day (home time), and under a scorching sky. The sun did its unique magic, in creating, preserving and restoring this very first memory. The earliest experience, exposed brilliantly on the photographic plate of memory, had left the truest deepest trace.

2009-06-21T13:24:00.002+01:00

It's old father sun's day.

It's that time again, the midsummer solstice, which strides up to us with wearisome predictability. Some perversity in the cosmos always decrees that the sun is elsewhere when he should be taking a bow for his longest performance. It means, of course, after this it's all down hill. The nights will start drawing in soon, and before we know it, the ads will start selling Christmas. Yes, I'm back, to bring a little sunshine into everyones lives.

This day presents the opportunity to assess the summer so far, and issue a mid-term appraisal. Now, let me see... It struck me the other day that either I'm softening along with my brain, or this summer hasn't been that bad so far. That bad being another way of saying anything like the last 2. It's all relative, I suppose. A friend who I hadn't seen for a while greeted me the other day with 'you must be pretty miffed with the lousy summer'. And there I was secretly thinking it had been OK. Not wonderful. It's not a proper summer for me until I hear the phrase 'hosepipe ban'. But we have to be thankful for small mercies in this climate, what with the solar credit crunch 'an all. I can say this much for summer 09 so far, Its heart is in the right place. It has, as Wilde once said of nature in general, good intentions. But has difficulty carrying them out. It just needs a bit of encouragement, to get back into its scorcher stride. So, instead of moaning, I'll look on the bright side, and say thank you. Thank you sun, for a miracle of a sunny dry bank holiday in May. Thank you for some good weekends (we'll turn a blind eye to the weeks in between). And thank you for not allowing it to rain that much. We really missed you the last 2 years, and we can see that your trying your best. Three cheers for the sun, and let's have a bloody good scorcher. Huzzah.

BTW, regulars of my romance blog venture might be amused to know I'm giving a talk about my book at Shakespeare & Co in Paris tomorrow. I'm hoping that a long lost lover will turn up, sing me her songs and sweep me off my feet. I'll let you know if it happens... TTFN.

2009-05-28T21:42:00.002+01:00

Fair weather friends to meteorology

This story made me laugh. I quote it directly:

Tourist chiefs at a seaside resort have accused the Met Office of losing the town £1 million because it got the weather forecast wrong on Bank Holiday Monday.

Bournemouth in Dorset was supposed to suffer thundery showers, according to the Met Office, but instead it actually had sunshine on the hottest day of the year so far, with temperatures hitting 22 degrees. However, tourism bosses said around 25,000 visitors stayed away from the town because of the "negative" prediction for rain. Mark Smith, head of Bournemouth Council's tourism department, said: "We do suffer badly from inaccurate weather reports. "The forecast was for thundery showers throughout the day but after 9am it remained bright and sunny and was the hottest day of the year so far. "The average amount spent by visitors per head is £41, so even for one day that cost us over a million pounds."

Will these be the same British Tourism bodies that will claim the weather is not important for British tourism, as our country has 'so much more to offer', should we suffer another washout summer? Bournemouth in the rain? I've been there. Don't do it.

Full story at: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21/20090528/tuk-weather-blunder-sparks-1m-storm-6323e80.html

2009-05-23T13:36:00.006+01:00

Time to Cover up? Too late.

As the sun finally comes out in strength, so do the public health messages frightening the living daylight out of us. Cover up is their theme. I find this particularly apt, given the true and shameful history of sunbathing. I tell this story in my book, but I was advised against being too cheeky or controversial by my editor. I also expected a lot more flack when interviewed by radio presenters. But, apart from the first one I encountered when publicising the hardback last year, all of those I've spoken to since have been sweetness and light on the sun safety controversy. It was his very first question, and it completely threw me: 'Why have you written a celebration of sunshine? Aren't we told to get out of it, and to avoid it?'* I think I faffed out some limp riposte, and kicked myself immediately afterwards when I thought of all the clever cutting things I should have said. And I was primed with notes the next time round, but the next time never came.

So, for what's worth, this is what I should have said. Cover up? I'm glad you mentioned that. Let me tell you about the most shameful cover up of all. The very same people who now tell us to get out of the sun, are those who encouraged us to make the most of it in the first place. Sun-bathing was invented, and promoted by public health authorities between the wars, not by the fashion industry that has been allowed to take the rap for it. Slip, slap, slop is their mantra. But they certainly slip up on the facts, slap down the wrong culprits, and are very sloppy in their grasp of history. Read all about it in my fascinating, controversial book (a precis of this story is found in the SunLounge section of my website, here). Incidentally, the photo above is not an early session of the Human League, complete with half-naked junior fan club, but an artificial sunlight clinic from the 1920s, exposing wee nippers to larges doses of UV light. Just proving the young have always been susceptible to the fashionable allure of the sun tan.

But we now know better, don't we. Do we? Why should we trust one set of ‘experts’ telling us to get out of it, when another set not 50 years before threw their equal conviction into telling us to get out into it? Given the sun is the source of all life, it would be odd that this stuff that we’ve been living with for millennia was intrinsically so bad for us. Especially as our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, then agriculturalists. We evolved spending a good deal of time under the elements.

But skin cancer is on the rise, we are told. That's the media simplifying things again. There are a few dermatologists and epidemiologists (the study of health in populations), who are prepared to speak out against the general of the sun being public health enemy no. 1. Looking into it, it would appear that the rise of skin 'cancer', is due to a re-classification of what are actually benign growths. In fact about 95 per cent of skin cancers are basal or squamous cell epitheliomas, which do not spread from the skin and kill. Medicine has become more cautious due to the fear of litigation. It's safer to be class all growths as potentially suspicious, rather than run the risk of being sued for negligence. Epidemiologists have also calculated that there is a far greater death toll from vitamin D deficiency than from deaths conclusively attributable to exposure to sunshine.

The point is, it’s just so one sided. When I published a piece on the history of the sun tan in a national newspaper they provided a sidebar called sunbathing by numbers, which provided some figures such as '1,800 people die from melanoma disease each year'. What, globally? More people die of trouser-related mishaps. '10-15 minutes in the sun provide the vitamin D your body needs daily'. When? Where? In winter in the northern hemisphere it jolly well doesn't. There is, in fact, no agreed optimum intake for Vitamin D, and there is no toxicity from sunlight synthesised vitamin D, which cannot be said for food supplements.

But not just in the national media, the so called expert research journals also show their true colours when reporting this issue (the skin care and pharmaceutical companies do spend an awful lot of money in advertising in these journals, o, and funding research). I discovered this little gem in a reputable dermatological journal. The paper’s title declared its hypothesis: that ‘UV Light tanning [is] a type of substance-related disorder’. A psychological illness in other words. To prove this the researchers modified questionnaires used for alcoholics and drug-users to apply to tanning. They substituted drink or fix for ‘tan’ – eg. “when you wake up in the morning do you want to sun tan?”; or “do you try other non-sun-related activities, but find you really still like spending time in the sun?” – and descended on sunbathers minding their own business on Galveston Island Beach, Texas.

Now, I’m no scientist, but even I can see this is totally spurious from a methodological point of view. Not only were the results underwhelming, there was no control. I might easily have taken the same questionnaire and descended on a troupe of church goers in bible belt America and asked them the very same questions, substituting tan or sunbathing for 'prayer' or 'church-attendance', and got probably more conclusive results. Does that make churchgoing a substance related disorder (especially high church where they swing that holy smoke about). What’s evident and quite staggering is the need to defame this practice, and that a scientific journal is prepared to publish such unscientific piffle. Why? Because there are vested interests in scaring us out of the sun.

If this appears paranoid and conspiratorial check this out: "The Sun Safety Alliance, Inc. (SSA) is a communication and educationally focused not-for-profit organization with the mission to reduce the incidence of skin cancer. SSA is dedicated to creating national awareness of skin cancer as an important health issue. SSA believes that a concerted focus on skin cancer prevention, education, and awareness is the only way to change generations of behavior." One of their main recommendations is this: "Use of sunscreen with SPF 15 (for children under six, SPF 30 is recommended) or higher during the first 18 years of life can reduce some types of skin cancer by nearly 78%." Most of their advice involves slapping the stuff on, all year round. Their board members and business partners? You've guessed it, commercial organisations such as the National Association of Chain Drug Stores Foundation, and the manufacturers of healthcare products. Fear sells, but the sun is free. Enjoy.

*These views were particularly galling, given the presenter was interviewing me from the Costa del Sol (where the radio station was based), and I was in rainy London. Like the corpulent, sated poor house governors in Oliver Twist, he could not imagine how we poor orphans might be asking for a little more.

2009-05-12T21:12:00.009+01:00

I haven't the foggiest
I'm frankly amazed at how much credibility folk give me when it comes to matters meteorological. They assume because I wrote a book about sunshine, I know a lot about the weather, and, here's the funny bit, might be able to predict what kind of summer we're going to have.

I'd better put the record straight. First of all, I have no interest in the weather in itself. I have a more than unhealthy interest in what the weather will do in the immediate future, and how this will affect my well-being / sanity; but I have no love of weather itself (it's the stuff that gets in the way of sunshine). I have no interest in or knowledge of meteorology. That is a science - the science of meteors, ie. stuff that falls from the skies, and I'd really rather it didn't. My relationship with the skies is profoundly superstitious, untouched by the supposed scientific breakthroughs that have 'revolutionised' forecasting since the middle of the last century. Supercomputers have replaced seaweed, in other words, which is a good deal cheaper and about as accurate.

What I do know of the weather which might form the basis of a prognosis for the summer is based on my acute memory of summers past. The data stored in my head and in my heart allows me to pronounce on the likely outcome for the summer, which can be summed up neatly as: 'buggered if I know'. The one sure thing I know about the British weather is that it is unknowable. And, therefore, a typical exchange in response to my stoical scepticism might go as follows:

Naive communicant: 'But we're having a lovely spring'
Sage who knows his onions (me): 'Groan. That's what worries me. We had a corker of a spring in 2007, followed by the worst summer in living memory. And last year? More sunshine in February than August'.
Slightly abashed naive communicant: 'So a good spring means a shoddy summer?'
Slightly smug sage: 'On recent performance. And vice versa. The spring of 2006 was pants. The wettest March since George IV, and dreary up to June; then 2 months of unbroken sunshine'.
Crestfallen communicant: 'So we're in for another stinker then?'
Starting to annoy sage: 'Not necessarily. You recall the summer of 03?
Weary communicant: 'What when all those people died from the heatwave?'
Wistful sage: 'That's the one. Glorious. Started in May, pretty much kept going without relent through to September. Records broken in August. It was ace.'
Brightening communicant: 'Ah, but we've had a really cold winter. It follows cold winter, scorching summer. So they say'.
Triumphantly smug sage: 'They say a lot of tosh. Winter of 62-3. Return of the ice age for 3 months. Followed by about average summer. And we all know what 'about average' UK summer is. Shite'.

I might hen bore them stupid with my roll call of good and bad summers, until they share my conviction that there's just no telling one way or the other, and hold a cast-iron conviction never to even mention the weather to me again.

2009-05-03T08:56:00.003+01:00

Forecasting about

One of the curses of extreme helioholism is extreme scepticism when it comes to what 'they' say about the kind of summer we are likely to have. This is aggravated by a long memory and a festering grievance at the number of times 'they' have let us down in the past. 'They' being both the weather forecasters and the heavens themselves. 'They', as far as I'm concerned, are in it together, to set up false hope, frustrate desire and have fun at my expense.

I'm truly amazed at how short most peoples memories are. And simply staggered by how much faith they are prepared to put in these shabby shamen with supercomputers the weather men. How many times have I heard it asserted with straight-faced sincerity over the last week that 'it's going to be a good one this year'? And how many ejaculations of derision have I issued in response? Wearily I shake my head at their innocence, and point out they say something of the like every bleeding year, including ... and I always pause here for optimum effect, raising a horny finger heavenwards to silence their prattling platitudes with my sageous sermonising ... including that annus horribilis the so-called 'summer ' of 2007. Then, they - and I've worked myself up into just short of a frenzy by now, verily spitting the word out - they blithely predicted there was a good chance that that summer might be much like the one before. A scorcher, whose kind I fear we've seen the last of, going on recent performance. And we all know what happened then. I haven't forgotten, and I certainly haven't forgiven. Like some old fool who refuses to buy a 'Jap' car, because of what they did in the war, I refuse to buy their prognoses, and hold a burning dagger in my heart for their long-range mendacity.

They are up to their tricks again. Barbecue summer? My arse. Is this what's got everyone excited? Mealy mouthed half-promises to placate an easily duped nation. It'll take more than that to fool me. And don't say I didn't warn you if those barbecue coals bought in anticipation in May are still unused come September.

2009-04-21T20:38:00.004+01:00

Deja vu (it must be spring)

Really, I of all people should know better, but it's happened again. A few days of fine weather, a particularly enchanting evening bathed in mellow gold after a day canopied by endless blue, and even I find myself tempted to believe this might be a foretaste of something to come. A proper summer, that is. The kind we had when an ice cream van, like the one that went round and round Arnold Circus, Shoreditch where I sat this evening catching the last rays of sun after work, tinkling out Yankee Doodle Dandy (the van that is, not me), was a permanent fixture of our summer streets. Not making opportunistic forays in spring time, because you never know if this might just be our lot for another year, and because he's still pushing stock purchased in 2007.

But there's something about spring that induces an absurd amnesia, even in hardened cynics and anxious sky-scrutineers like me. An enchantment tinged with nostalgia, redolent of a time when it was always summer, summer never let you down, and you would live forever anyway. And an enchantment not unlike the complicit enthrallments of love. Very like. The willingness to believe this year's scorcher had better last. Prepared to be swept away by its seductive coaxings, and let the guard down. Based on recent performances that would be a mistake. (Choose what referent you will here). But, for one enchanted evening I gave in to its sweet sophistries. Watch this space.

2009-03-22T20:26:00.003Z

I can see a tunnel at the end of all these lights

Well, this is a cracking start to spring. A whole week of the golden stuff to lift the hearts of the nation in these depressing times. It certainly put a smile on most people's chops, and did its usual magic of making even we Brits spring in our steps. It also made the story of my new appointment as Thomson's Dr Sunshine eminently newsworthy, and I spent all Friday talking to radio stations up and down the country about why sunshine makes us happy, and what being Dr Sunshine involves.

That's Dr Sunshine. Not 'Mr' Sunshine, as one presenter - I forget which in my whirlwind tour and indignation - termed me. I was that close to retorting, in Mike Myers' Dr Evil Voice: 'That's Dr Sunshine. I didn't spend 6 years in sunshine school to be called Mr'. But I didn't. The thrill of live radio for me is the risk that I might just say what I shouldn't, but I managed to rein that retort in, and do a credible job of bestowing due dignity to my important new post.

I also feel I need to make perfectly clear that being Dr Sunshine doesn't mean I'm suddenly of a sunny disposition. A few friends thought it hilarious that this curmudgeonly old so and so, was now called Dr Sunshine, as there was generally precious little of it shining from any part of me for most of the year. Therefore I would like to clarify: my role is to explore it, assess it, grade it and help promote it. It's possible that in the process the high-grade sunshine may very well dispel the cloud-like melancholy that envelopes my sensitive soul. It remains to be seen. Until then, I hope you all enjoyed spring. Let's just hope that wasn't our summer, as so often happens. I for one, am taking no chances, and look forward to my first consignment...

2009-03-16T16:45:00.011Z

The Sun Blog returns in style

Rejoice sun-lovers. Today (March 20), is the Spring Equinox, when the sun gains ascendancy over the darkness, and the days start to be longer than the nights. Our ancestors celebrated it with all kinds of exciting pagan shenanigans. But I mark the occasion with the return of LoveSunshine for its scorching summer season, and to announce an exciting new development: my new role as Dr Sunshine, Thomson holiday's very own resident sunshine expert.

What does that involve? Well, the best bit involves my going to all kinds of sunny destinations to assess their product, and help them give their customers what they really want. And what they really want is sunshine, it would appear. I helped Thomson devise a survey, which revealed that 97% of their sample considered the weather an important factor in their holiday choice. And three quarters stated that sunshine makes them feel happy. A whopping 92% considered sunshine the best way to beat stress. Sunshine is the ultimate feel-good tonic, and people considered at least one foreign holiday a year as essential, even in these straightened times. They were saving for a rainy day, literally, and that's what we generally get instead of a summer here. Which is good news for Thomson, and supports what I've been promoting in this blog and in my book - our fundamental need for sunshine, especially if we have another summer like the last two. Forget the financial climate, the real scandal is the meteorological one, and it's gratifying to see we Brits are still determined to flit off abroad to access the real stuff. The pound might be prostrate against the Euro, but the best news is sunshine is free.

And the best news for me, is my new role as Dr Sunshine. They will look to me for expert advice; I will help them understand the importance of sunshine from numerous perspectives; help shape their product offering, and its promotion. But, best of all, I get to sample it. It's a tough job, but someone's gotta do it. And you can see, I'm up to the task and ready to start assessing. Lab coat over my Speedos, clipboard and flip flops at the ready. It's my dream job (oh, and my book Sunshine is out in paperback in May). Here's to sunny days ahead... If you don't believe me, check out the press release; and if you need some instant sun check out Thomson's sunny delights here.

2008-11-04T20:24:00.004Z

Normal service will be resumed in the spring

Like a shabby resturant at a holiday resort, I'm pulling my shutters for the winter. A blog dedicated to the delights of sunshine during the cold, damp dreary months, is destined to have a desperate time of it. Hold on, has had a desperate time of it, through the cold, damp dreary months of summer. Who, I ask you, really wants me droning on through the winter? It might be nice for the fortunate anonymous to send us sunny dispatches from down under, but that would only be rubbing it in. Imagine the helioholic hibernating (not, alas, migrating), in some dark musty cave of self-pity until spring time. Spring which will bring the publication of my lovely Sunshine book in paperback. And finally, I'm glad to say, with a sub-title that doesn't make my flesh creep with embarrassment. 'Why we love the sun'. Why do we? I'm glad you asked me, read all about it in etc...

And yet, I'm not hibernating quite. I'm cooking up a wee venture that I've just launched called 'But some of us are looking at the stars'. That'll keep me busy (I may even post more regularly there), and give me more scope to pontificate, during the winter months. More candlelight than sunlight, as you will see if you visit me at http://arkofromance.blogspot.com/ and join in. See you sunshine lovers in the spring...

2008-10-22T22:05:00.007+01:00

Everywhere I go (I take the weather with me)

I'm back (in all senses). I can now confess the real reason for the rather up-beat, spring-in-my- stride, tone of my most reason posts. Yes the interminable fog of the summer had lifted; yes, we had a few late-vintage scorchers as meagre consolation for the insult that was summer; but this was all bolstered by a sneaky flit I was planning for mid October. So off I flitted and have now (alas) returned from a week in Crete - the southernmost island in Greece, and nearly the most southerly part of Europe.

I know what you're expecting: to hear of the torrential downpours that greeted me, the freak blizzards cutting off the beaches for exactly a week, and of my agonies of a holiday spent under a damp parasol drowning in gin. You'd be right to expect such things, because I sure as hell did. I'm not generally a superstitious chap, but I am when it comes to the weather. And I'm seriously beginning to think I'm cursed. In fact, it's only a matter of time before the Met Office ask me to notify them of my holiday plans as a pretty sure indication of the ghastly weather that part will surely experience while I'm there.

So, you can appreciate, it was with some trepidation that I boarded the plane last Tuesday from, of course, blue skies at Gatwick on my final attempt to get some sun for the year. Why do I not consult a forecast for my destination? To understand why I don't is to peer into the swirling cauldron of unreason and petulence that is my head when it comes to the weather. Because if I did, and discovered it was anything less than wall-to-wall sunshine, I'd be in two minds about boarding the plane. I've paid for sunshine, I demand sunshine, I expect nothing less. It's part of the excitement of going. Consequently my flights are interesting affairs for all concerned. I immediately read the signs. The pilot will generally mention the weather at destination as part of his spiel. It comes after the flight time, and the time difference at destination. This is no true indication. They lie. Yes they do. In the same way they preserve this fiction that people are able to sit back, relax, enjoy your flight (in a space that would contravene international animal welfare rights if you were a chicken, gripped with terminal boredom, discomfort and frustration), they want to manage our expectations very carefully. To the expert/ pessimist, their lies are transparent. 'I'll up date you later on the weather at destination' = it's pissing down, and if I were you I'd stay at home. 'The weather is a rather pleasant x degrees, with a light breeze, and some scattered clouds' = it's completely overcast, but muggy. Not mentioning it at all is ominous and can mean anything from hurricanes to locusts. Or it can mean he's forgotten. I can hope he's forgotten, and spend the rest of the flight staring out of the window.

Thence commences the white-knuckle ride that is my flight, with my face glued to the porthole willing the clouds to disperse and reveal the eldorado bellow. The clouds thicken. I tense up. How far left to go? They thin, disperse, disappear. I relax a bit. Can we just put down there please? They thicken again as we get closer. Can't we go just that bit further til we've lost 'em. And so on. No doubt many a neighbour has noticed my torments and feared the worst. Why is that guy so anxious? Sweating and mumbling to himself? Oh God, perhaps he's a suicide bomber, saying his final prayer before he…

To touch down under anything but glorious blue robs me of one of the chief pleasures: that extraordinary embrace of home coming when the warm air first hits you on leaving the plane. This has happened often, and it happened this time. Oh yes, Crete was overcast, and so was I. Here we go again, thought I and was simply intolerable for the first evening. Then comes the next ritual. The first moment of consciousness on the first morning. I'm quite an expert on that too. The light filtered through blinds, the time, the orientation of the hotel, how built up it is are all factored in before I summon up the courage tiptoe over and verify my worst fears....

I'll draw a veil now over the tantrums, the torments and teenage behaviour Dr Robert Mighall age 41 displays on such occasions. You don't want to know, and I'm not proud. Generally it comes out ok. It will lift by lunch time (as it did last week). The devils will give up their sport with me, I will find what I have been seeking and all is well with the world. Until next time. Christmas in Morocco. Booked last week. And it all starts again...

2008-10-11T09:20:00.004+01:00

L'Allegro (at last)

Milton fans among you (?) would have seen this one coming, but none of us would have expected it to have taken quite so long. When I was embracing my inner melancholic (what do I mean inner?), and attempting to find some virtue in the climate that has seeped soddenly into our souls, I was hoping to flip it over as soon as the sun shone. As soon as the sun shone.... erhem.... But then it didn't, and it didn't and it didn't. And then it did, but I, of course was not here, was in fact selflessly suffering grey skies in Spain so we could have sun here. But now it is shining, and has been for about 4 whole days. So all is well with the world, and I'm walking on sunshine. Which prompts me to complete my dreary diptych on climate and creativity.

Sunshine may very well not be so conducive to art as rain is in this country. Walking on Sunshine (which is by a British band), is a lovely record. It perfectly sums up a sentiment in a burst of aural glee, with bouncy brass as yellow and shining as the old current bun itself. But no one could accuse it of being art. Club Tropicana - fun and sunshine, there's enough for everyone - is to, say Morrissey's rain-soaked melancholic musings, what a Club 18-30 holiday brochure is to Gerald Brenan's South of Granada, or Laurie Lee's As I woke up one Midsummer Morning (about the Costa del Sol before a hotel appeared). The Wham! (the ! says it all) song and video, is of interest principally to testify to our naivety back then in believing George Michael had even a passing interest in the ladies.

Sunshine turns our heads, and turns off our creativity. Perhaps. But not entirely. For a start, old habits die hard. Shelley's poem, 'Stanzas Written in Dejection Above the Bay of Naples' is a case in point. which opens: 'The sun is warm, the sky is clear, / The waves are dancing fast and bright,/' And describes a scene a travel brochure copywriter would weep to be able to describe. But old Percy B. continues:

Alas, I have nor hope nor health
Nor peace within nor calm around,
Nor that content surpassing wealth...
Nor fame nor power nor love nor leisure -
Others I see whom these surround,
Smiling they live and call life pleasure:
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.

Good grief. Pull yourself together man. Stanzas written in dejection above a slag heap in Bolton I can accept. Spring 1818, Keats spent in Devon with his dying brother Tom. They had hoped to be in Lisbon, but couldn't afford it. It appears to have rained every day for about 6 weeks. Shelley, loafing above the bay of Naples on a sunny day, looking on one of the most glorious sights in Europe still, is feeling sorry for himself. And as for not having leisure. An Etonian aristocrat whose idea of a day's work was wearing a big blouse and penning a few grumpy lines while on permanent holiday (sorry exile from the political oppression of Britain) has no sympathy from me. But it does show you how deep the melancholy runs. It takes a while for the clouds to burn off.

It didn't take David Hockney long, if I may stray into another medium. He flits off to America in 1961, and comes to live there in 1963 drawn to southern California. 1963 is the year Summer Holiday came out, during the worst winter of the 20th century. When Cliff was singing about going where the sun shines brightly, and going where the sea was blue, our David was delighting in those very things, slapping 'em down in pure acrylic colour and turning the dream into art. We can do it. Grey misery might spur us into art, and, on the whole forge finer productions; yet it also spurs us into a desperate need to escape. And when we do escape we have eyes ready to see it and souls ready to engage with what we see. Like sunflowers kept in cellars, we only need someone to open to door to make us shine...

Right. That's quite enough pretentious bombast for one day. There are some sunbeams out there with my name on them, and the only canvas I'm going to be colouring today is the one stretched on my scrawny frame. Exits stage left humming Walking on Sunshine.

2008-10-03T22:24:00.004+01:00

The secret of my perkiness?

Regular followers have expressed wonder and worry at the up-beat, positive and downright chipper face I have shown to the world in my last few postings. What's wrong? they enquire, concerned for my mental health. Isn't it obvious? Why, winter's fast approaching.

Pardon? You no doubt riposte. Has the helioholic finally lost it completely, or switched his affinities towards dark days, long nights and and ever longer thermal pants? Not at all. This always happens, especially after a lousy summer (so often, then): as winter approaches I cheer up. Not because I like winters, but it means I can give up hoping. And when I give up hoping, I give up despairing. I'm a different person. Indeed, I've just watched a weekend weather forecast with complete indifference. It doesn't touch or torment me. They informed us it's going to be rainy and grim and cold this weekend. But, unlike 4 weeks ago, I have no right to swear at the TV, curse the presenters and whatever mean little devil whose tricks they catalogue and collude in. Had they told me it was going to be fine it would be a welcome bonus, not a right; a cause for happiness, not the righteous indignation has gripped me for the last 4 months. As the weather worsens I simply wrap up - in all senses.

I have reverse SAD. While real sufferers start to get depressed at this time of year, I get on with life. Now, don't get me wrong. I don't like winter, and I simply loathe Christmas. For me it is a rehearsal for death (you see, it is still the sunshine Scrooge under the Santa outfit). Two things you can't avoid in life: Death and Christmas. Unless you do what I try to do each year, hook it to a Muslim country where it's warm and stay toasting til the coast is clear. But as the vile exercise is now extended over a three month period that would ruin me. Anyway, even there there's no escape (unless I smuggle myself into Mecca). I once spent Christmas in Cairo, and the Egyptians insisted on wishing me Merry Christmas. I once even had to flee from a Santa who wanted to hug me on the streets of Casablanca. I do not like winter. I do not like cold, I do not like dark. But as we've been having these conditions in summer for the last 2 years, I'm simply more prepared to tolerate them in their proper season, and without the deluded desire for anything better. Not that my relieved resignation means I've forgiven and forgot the outrage of these 'summers'. Nor 1985, 2000, 2002 for that matter either. Oh no. It's all gone in the book (it has actually), the pain, the anguish, the desperate longing for justice, have left deep deep scars. But 2007 and 2008 are now scars, rather than wounds. They have become history.

Besides, there's booking the Christmas escape jaunt, and maybe a cheeky little top up in between. For as Shelley put it, if winter's here, you can still tan your behind....

2008-10-03T09:31:00.002+01:00

Rob reading from Common Ground, originally uploaded by Nina Pope.

I am a kid with a new toy. I've just discovered that I can blog directly from Flickr. I love Flickr, and pretty soon will explain why. I don't like the fact that I can't change the font, and I don't know how to add tags, but this is rather smashing. This is the last one from the event. I just shows that it is possible for me to be inside when the sun is out. Only my dusy boot is in the sun, while I was engrossed in Dickens, while the audience - vide gentleman on my left staring outside - are evidently engrossed in my sparkling words. The gentleman in not a helioholic wishing he was out in the sun, but an architectural historian wishing he was outside looking at the buildings and not listening to the berk in green who had roped him along with promise of marshes and routemasters. A jolly day nonetheless. And don't you think it impressive that a man can read and balance a disco ball on his head? (both photos by Nina Pope)

Why I was so frolicsome

2008-10-03T09:23:00.001+01:00

City, originally uploaded by Nina Pope.

There you go. There's photographic evidence from the Great Common Ground Dickens Misadventure down the Thames, and then up the Thames, and then down the Thames again. Basically, a moving sunbathing platform as far as I was concerned. The City in all its finery. The last final, belated burst of summer.

2008-09-30T08:18:00.003+01:00

Looking on the bright side (thanks to the sun)

On Sunday a trip that had been planned for almost a year took place, or didn't take place (depending on how you look at it). The idea was to take a boat down river, from the centre of London to Gravesend in Kent. Thence to board a bus (a lovely old routemaster), to take us to the Kent Marshes to explore the terrain evoked so powerfully in the opening pages of Dickens's novel Great Expectations. In an earlier life I was a Dickensian, and so before I wrote about sun, sun, sun, it was Fog Everywhere. I wrote a chapter about the Marshes and Dickens's novel for a book called Common Ground: Around Britain in Thirty Writers. A pot of Arts Council money was secured for a jolly to let people experience what I had written about, 45 expectant people signed up, and turned up at St Katharine's dock with great expectations for a trip into Dickensian Kent. It was then that we learned the day we had chosen (about 3 months ago), was the day our dear mayor Boris the Berk, had chosen to clean the Thames Barrier. I don't think he was actually doing it himself. Going by his appearance, cleaning isn't the top of his list of priorities or skills. But of all days in the year this was the one he decided to close the barriers and prevent us visiting the Marshes, the whole point of our day out and the reason 45 people were standing on a jetty on a Sunday morning. The skipper offered to drive up and down the river a bit, and we duly agreed.

A disaster. Tantrums, demands for reimbursement, threats to sue the organisers, Boris, the Port of London Authority, Old Man River? Not a bit of it. For a start, if you know the novel, it's rather fitting. When Pip and Magwitch attempt to make it down river, so the returned convict can hop it away, they are apprehended. But that's a nice, academic distinction. What saved the day was the kind old sun, smiling on us all day long, setting the river a-sparkle with diamond dance, and polishing everything a good deal shinier than Boris's char-woman with her J-Cloth and Mr Sheen up on his lousy Barrier. Balls to his Barrier. We had a rare old time soaking up the sun, knocking back the gin, and seeing the Thames, London, England, Creation at their finest.

For the summer, like the 5.55 train from Burgess Hill to Victoria has finally arrived. Late, ridiculously, shamefully late, but welcome nonetheless. It has been hanging around off and on for the last 13 days. 5 of them I spent in Spain, and I'd like to take the credit for kick starting the final burst of summer by selflessly leaving the country. Something that never fails to ensure the clouds clear, and usually follow me. I had planned to tell the woeful tale of leaving Gatwick through glorious blue to touch down in miserable grey Malaga nearly 2 weeks ago, but it would break your hearts or split your sides with laughter. Especially as I had fought tooth and nail to get my passport. The irony avalanched me prostrate in misery at the time. The airport security guards had to prise me off the tarmac as I wept and beat the floor in torment. But that is all rainwater under the bridge now. The sun has done his magic (both in Spain and back here), and saved what could have been a disaster, and for this he must be given full credit. What larks, old Sun. What larks.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Common-Ground-Around-Britain-Writers/dp/1904879934

2008-09-13T15:43:00.004+01:00

A ´cautionary tale

We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison…
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

The one thing that makes living in this sun-denuded dungeon bearable is our ability to escape it. We are the undisputed leaders and hub of the budget airline industry, carrying some 80 million passengers around Europe each year, with 60 million of them starting or ending their journey in the UK. Unable to bear it much longer, and finding a window for a long weekend to Spain for guaranteed sun, I resolved to swell their ranks (how was I to know the sun had only been awaiting my departure to show his face?). I booked my ticket, whooped with joy, and then went to fetch my passport.

It was then than I noticed my passport was also a little under the weather. An accident with some vodka a few years back had finally taken its toll. Not on me - that horse is well and truly bolted - but my picture, or rather the plastic cover on the photo page, which was coming apart. Hmm, thinks I. They might think I´ve been tampering with it and not let me into Spain. I must ´fix it´. And so with skill, and care and cunning, I put a wee dob of fixative between plastic and card, wiped it clean, pressed it together and resolved to get a new one when I´m back from my trip. If it is wise to quit when one is ahead, it would have been wise to quit then. But for some reason I decided that the final touch was needed, and this involved pressing it with a hot iron. You snort do you? You are fully aware that this is a stupid thing to do, are you? So am I, now. I´m an expert on how misguided this is, and became so the moment I removed the piece of paper I had carefully lain across between iron and plastic (I´m stupid, but not that stupid), to be confronted by the above frightful spectacle. The rotting of a corpse in a wattery grave was not more horrible, as Wilde described the picture of Dorian Gray eaten by the leprosies of sin. I wouldn´t mind, but I hadn´t had half the fun he had to have a portrait like that. Worse, I had 4 days before my flight. It was now a Saturday morning, and I had a passport photo that looked like it had been painted by Edvard Munch. The only way the Spanish immigration were going to let me in is if I contracted a raging palsy before embarking. If the apolplexy I was then suffering didn´t get me first.

On enquiry, I discovered for replacement passports, the best they could manage was a week (and 109 quid). I´d need counter-signed photos by a respeatable person who´d known me more than 2 years (a small pool as my Dorian-like portrait suggests). I quickly relealised I was stuck in Britain. Beyond the sun beat down; I had booked my ticket, but here it looked likely I would have to stay. A week and my window would close. And I thought I was miserable before. Tbc...

2008-09-11T09:35:00.007+01:00

Carping daily

Seize the day exhorts the poet-philosopher, but how can you when every day slips sloppily from your grasp and plops into a puddle of lost Time?

It may seem absurd to carp on about lost sunshine - and, believe me, I'm heartily sick of the sound of my own voice on this one, and would dearly like to put some of the love back in this blog - but sunshine is merely the symbol, life is the substance here. The sun marks our days, or would do if we could see it. The absence of the sun in what is supposed to be summer more truly reveals us to be mere walking shadows than if we could actually see them striding to meet us in the mornings and evading us come nightfall. There is more than fear in a handful of mud. It's fine for those philosophers, loafing around under the blue skies of Greece or Rome, to establish such principles. Their days were worth the seizing. Ours are put on hold. Life is what slips by as we are waiting for the weather to improve.

It'll clear up next week. No it won't. Next month will be better, so they lie. And before we know it, it's gone. The shops are already putting out their Christmas decorations, like so many nails in the coffin of summer. And so we mothball our hopes for another year, losing much more than a chance to wear the clothes we bought in spring. But that's OK, as they won't fit us now. We grow old, we grow old. To avoid the puddles we keep our trousers rolled. Sunshine is life - it is the source of all life -; but it has also become the light source of 'Lifestyle', a seductive package we've all bought into. The ads that will soon be sprinkled with fake snow fantasies of Dickensian delusion, have just finished selling us other desires, a-sparkle with fatuous golden promise to mock our most cherished dreams. Only marketeers believe in seasons in this country. So refuse. Refuse their Christmas. Resist their new season lies until they deliver what they sold us last season. If we can't have summer, then we shouldn't have to endure Christmas. Do so, and we might just resist Time itself. And although we can't make our sun stand still, or even visit us, yet we can make him run*.

*Robert Mighall, 41 years old, single, overworked and under-sunned is not having a good time of it. He apologises to the estate of T.S. Eliot, the shades of Andrew Marvell, Shakespeare, et al, the English language and the blogosphere, his long suffering mother, the weather men and the climate who mean him no personal ill; and finally his neighbours below, tormented by his demented tread and mournful wail, and ever-vigilant for the kick of a chair and the judder of a rope.

2008-09-04T09:57:00.003+01:00

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...

2008-08-27T20:59:00.004+01:00

First thoughts on sunshine and memory

As I can scarcely remember what sunshine looks and feels like I thought I would hold forth on the subject of memory itself, as a realm richly resonant of sunshine. Sunshine is often both agent and subject of the remembered past. As I put it in the book (in my favourite chapter, as it happens), the mind recollects what it collects and has a magpie's eye for the shiny stuff.

I'm off on this theme because, as it's getting close to back-to-school time, I was struck at how spectacularly cheated the little darlings have been of the stuff that traditionally preserves pleasant childhood memories and nurtures some widely-held delusions. The summer gave out just at the very moment school did, and the sun has scarcely shown its face for the whole time they have been off. As I walk past an empty school yard each morning, and see the overflowing drains clogged with damp leaves and crisp packets (not to mention discarded knives, syringes, and AK-47s - I live in the East End), I share their outrage, and wonder if this, added to the complete washout of last year, will prevent this generation subscribing to the popular delusion that the sun shone more when we were young.

Those with young 'uns might get them to sign testimonies that this summer and the last were decidedly pants, and, if they ever feel inclined to subscribe to the popular delusion in later life, these statements can be used as evidence to the contrary. According to Bill Bryson, the belief that “British summers used to be longer and sunnier” is one of the “idiosyncratic notions you come to accept when you live for a long time in Britain”.I've talked to Americans (from the South), Australians and Italians about this, and they have no idea what I'm talking about. And it's easy to see why, there is no need for nostalgia if you have a reliable and abundant supply. A bit like talking about the weather at all. 'Nice day' is a rather pointless observation if all or most days are nice, and this counts retrospectively too. But nearly all Brits share a belief that the official records refute. According to Met Office records (the past they can do quite reliably, it's the future and even the present that they find tricky), the last 2 decades have actually seen more sunshine (hard though it is to believe at the moment), than the decades of our youth. That's why I'm entertaining the notion of signed testimonies during what is clearly a setback in the blissful picture the experts derisively dangle before us.

For I believe the simple fact of greater exposure is one reason why we of a certain age believe the sun shone more when we were young. (I actually don't. Obsessed with sunshine from an early age, I've always had more exacting demands from the heavens, and can recall being indignant at summers not unlike this one even as a nipper). But for most people it's probably down to a simple aggregate of sunlit exposure. Most of us now spend the majority of our time in doors during the day, entombed in corporate prisons. That leaves weekends to see the sun, and sod's law says it won't be there when we are. When we were young, we finished school at 3.30, probably walked home (paedophiles hadn't been invented then); had morning and afternoon playtimes, and didn't spend our lunch 'hours' munching a sarnie chained to our desks, but frisking happily outside. And of course we had six whole weeks in the summer to at least up our quota. We simply increased the odds that some of those days might be sunny. The sun wasn't out more in the past, we were. (This is perhaps the most prosaic reason for this link between sunshine and memory. There is more to say, certainly, and I will recall what I have to say when I can recall what sunshine is. Does anyone remember? Does anyone remember waking up and seeing a sky of blue? Answers on a postcard, UK residents only.)

2008-08-21T19:44:00.006+01:00

Il Penseroso 2

I'm resolved to pursue this rather morose line of reasoning at least until the weather improves. To lose one summer is unfortunate, to lose two starts to look like carelessness. I'd gladly swap some of Britain's golden Olympic medals for a few record-beating golden days. Just a few. But I'm supposed to be ruminating from my dark mossy cell on our dreary weather, our predilection for melancholy and the belief that there is some kind of creative intercourse between them. I use the term precisely.

Anthony Woodward and Robert Penn rather like our weather. They both live in Wales, so they've had plenty of practice. I saw them give a very amusing talk on their book The Wrong Kind of Snow a few weeks back, where they reiterated the point made in their introduction that rain has been very good for Britain. So much rain means green green grass. The green green grass fed nice fat sheep to make jolly nice wool, and jolly nice wool made Britain, as they put it, 'a great trading nation. The wealth from wool - damp weather converted for export - gave us the most advanced economy in the world, bankrolling the Industrial Revolution, and helping create the largest empire of modern times'. They also point out that the invention of most ball games from lawn tennis to football occurred in these green isles because the grass was so good we had to invent amusing things to do on it. None of this particularly stirs me into any kind of patriotic fervour or allows me to embrace the persistent showers as so many pennies from heaven. We may have invented or excelled at these things once, but even I (who have zero interest in sport) know the pantomime pony of our glory days of sporting triumph has well and truly bolted. But we still have the rain, o yes, raining every day on the lush green sward without an industrial revolution or a sporting one to convert it into anything but misery and despair. I'm not managing this idea very well, am I?

Ok, the industrial revolution created wealth; but it also created great plumes of smoke and smog, blotting out the sun to the extent that in the City of Westminster in December 1890 there were recorded zero hours of sunlight. A vicious circle. Rain fuels industrial innovation, industry creates more beastly stuff to blot out the sun. Joyous. And what of now? Whatever happened to the idea that global warming might be coming our way in the form of a 'Mediterranean climate?'. The latest is what we will get as our Nemisis for industrial pre-eminence is 'climate change', ie. much much more of the same. More disgraceful summers like the last two. Well I hope the bleeding sheep are happy.

Can I discern any silver linings from these historico-climatic speculations? Well, I suppose fog and smog do at least have a rather romantic and nostalgic tinge to them, and did actually, to be fair, inspire wondrous art. Would Dickens's Bleak House be quite such a powerful novel without that extraordinary description of foggy London in the opening chapter? Or would Stevenson's Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (the Penguin Classics edition of which I can heartily recommend), have gripped our imaginations so tightly had the the 'chocolate coloured pall' of fog not cloaked his tale in sepulchral eeriness? Or Whistler and Monet have painted such melting masterpieces of atmospheric effect had we not made smog one of our most important aesthetic hallmarks? TBC...

http://www.wrongkindofsnow.com/index.phtml

2008-08-13T20:52:00.003+01:00

Il Penseroso

I have to accept that summer is officially cancelled, and winter has queue-jumped autumn, and must put a brave face on it. Actually, no, that is simply beyond me. But instead of unloading a torrent of righteous indignation as the heavens deliver theirs of cold, wet, windy despair, or instead of muttering a plaintive elegy over this stillborn summer, I will attempt a more philosophical perspective on these circumstances. No easy task, but here goes...

I was led to pursue this line by a response to my last blog from anonymous (whom I darkly suspect of hailing from sunnier climes), that fine weather doesn't produce the best poems. The implication is that grey skies and creativity might be more conducive bedfellows, and that this is somehow a silver lining to the brooding bleakness enveloping us (me) at present. Might there be something in this? Sidestepping poetry for the moment, pop music does lend some support to this notion. Jeremy Paxman suggests something of the kind in his book, The English - when he proposes the “reasonable supposition that cold wet weather, which forced teenagers to stay indoors in winter instead of going to the beach or skiing, probably has something to do with the country’s capacity for inventive rock music”. But we can go even further, not just pop music per se, but miserable pop music. The British didn't invent pop music, and didn't really invent many strains of it. We are particularly good at adapting it, giving it a particularly edgy feel and sound, and adding lyrical genius. And if you look at what is characteristic about what we contribute to the pop canon, and, more significantly, what is most successful as an export, a discernible and distinctive trait sums this up - misery. We are maestros of musical melancholy, and frankly, who can wonder in this climate?

I'm serious. If you think about it, there's an awful lot of misery in British pop, and especially the most successful exports. The obvious one is Goth. One of the few truly home-grown British pop product lines, it is a highly successful global export of long-standing, and Alien Sex Fiend ought to be given the Queen's Award For Industry for what they spawned 25 years ago. And then there is Morrissey. I don't know of a single male Italian of a certain age, who does not worship Morrissey and the Smiths. There's one who lives down below me, who will spend warm sunny days (when we had them) in doors, listening to tales of rainy Salford, and finding this exotic and beguiling. The rain falls hard on a humdrum town, and a good part of the globe (and generally the sunnier parts of it), lap that rain up by the bucketload. It is particularly ironic that Morrissey moved to LA and then latterly Rome, but it doesn't stop him singing about the 'slate grey Victorian skies' he left behind, and which those in his adopted home find strangely enticing. Radiohead don't sing about the weather (I'm not sure what they sing about, to be honest), but they look and sound like they've spent their whole lives starring out the window at rain, and they are, I'm told, the most successful band to break America since the Beatles. Hmm. I suppose the Beatles weren't miserablists at first, not in their mop-top, happy, jangly days; but it's interesting to see what America produced to meet the threat of the British invasion. What could they do to meet the challenge of muddy Mersey merriment? Hit back with sunshine. The Beach Boys, the Byrds, and then the whole San Fran scene, until sunshine won the battle, and the Beatles themselves joined the hippie trail to the sun. Depeche Mode - started off as electrobubblegum popsters, and delighted few outside these shores - got darker, darker still, so dark the lead singer tastes death momentarily - and they're an international sensation, while they can scarcely get arrested at home.

So, what does this suggest? Simply, that our climate cultivates mouldy misery, that more fortunate cultures enjoy like rich truffles, damp with our despair. This is a silver lining of a kind, I suppose. But I ain't seeing any of the royalties.

2008-08-09T18:00:00.005+01:00

O for a beaker of the warm south...

I swear I had the very best intentions to vary my repertoire and give my more lyrical side an airing. All was well until the very last minute when a thorough soaking by the delights of the English 'summer' drowned all other thoughts from my mind. And so all I can muster is a good old fashioned rant at the insult that passes for that season in this unpleasantly green and sodden land. And by 'old-fashioned' rant I mean it, and can spout off knowing I do so among the very best company. Our finest poets head up a venerable tradition of meteorological moaners.

I'll let Shakespeare explain. His 34th sonnet asks:

Why did thou promise such a beauteous day,
And make me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds o’ertake me in my way,
Hiding thy brav’ry in their rotten smoke?

Yep, you and me both Bill. And not just rotten 'smoke', but pissing, incessant rain too. It matters not that the point of his sonnet is to decry the fickleness of his beloved, whose mind and affections change like the weather. For he evidently speaks eloquently from experience. For as he declares in the sonnet before that one:

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace...

This is a man who has clearly done as I have done today - thrown caution to the wind, and been hoodwinked by the absurd fiction denoted by the date on the calendar, and the fact that it was sunny when I set out in sandals. Serves me bloody well right, you might protest. We have scientific 'weather forecasts' now, when in Shakespeare's day they had merely quaint folk wisdom. My arse. I make it a principle never to consult weather forecasts. They will either (a) delude me with false promise of sunshine, or (b) depress me with their firm conviction of the opposite. And, besides, the other day I faltered, and did consult the BBC up-to-the-minute 'forecast' for the next day, but I couldn't get beyond the what-the-weather-is-doing-in-London-at-this-precise-moment window, which simply beggared belief. Whilst the whizzy flash display had black clouds and torrential rain, my wide survey of the skies for as far as the eye could see revealed the opposite. Whilst Shakespeare's weather prognosticators might not have had bleeding great computers and flashy displays to assist his decision on what dress might be suitable for his day's adventure, they probably had the sense to at least peep out of the window before hazarding an opinion on at least the current state of meteorological play.

Everywhere I turned today was confirmation of the dismal, depressing, and ancient scandal of our climate. I spent the day damply reading Keats's letters in the British Library, as the rain thrummed incessantly down. Keats, standing equidistant between Shakespeare's day and ours, had a similar time of it. In 'spring' 1818 he had joined his brother in Devon where he had travelled in the hope that the climate of the 'English Rivera' as it would later laughably be called, would improve his fragile health. Some hope. Keats wrote to a friend how he had wished to send him a picturesque description of the county, but he wasn't seeing much of it. Or anything - confined day after day, week after week inside, 'with a sense of being drown'd and rotted like a grain of Wheat'. He declared that is is 'Impossible to live in a country which is continually under hatches', and not unreasonably wondered who would live here 'when there is such a place as Italy? ... Rain! Rain! Rain!'. There was indeed, such a place as Italy, and there still is, and incidentally it was 34 degrees and sunny today in Rome, with much the same for the forecastable future. And in Rome it is the very height of summer, and they might very well dread (yes, dread), the prospect of another 2 months at least of this stuff. Sigh. Yet poor Keats didn't get to Rome until it was too late. Before this last desperate bid for health the furthest he travelled was Scotland. He went on a walking holiday of the north a few months after his rain-soaked sojourn in Devon. This was technically summer, but appears to have been no drier.

Where is this all going, you might wonder. It's not really going anywhere. Beyond the declaration that this is simply wrong. it was wrong for Shakespeare (a poet who couldn't bring himself to compare his love to a summer's day, because, frankly, in England, that wouldn't be a compliment, and he'd have got a clip round his ear for his troubles); it was wrong for poor old Keats, soaked and rotted into an early grave. And it's wrong now. To have your central heating on in early August is simply wrong. To spend what's supposed to be the most joyous season of one year (make that 2, as last year was even worse), of the short span of life allotted to us avoiding puddles of dirty water is wrong. I will continue to rant and rage against the dying of this light as our summer dies of a certain consumption before our very eyes. If anyone reading this comes from 'such a place as Italy', then rejoice in your good fortune, survey the blue dome above your head, breathe in a draught of that warm south, a draught of life - as it's meant to be lived....

2008-08-02T12:20:00.006+01:00

A new project, a new leaf

My embarcation on my new project (a biog of Keats) has encouraged me to review my blogatorial activities, and assess my own performance. Has 'love sunshine' fulfilled its purpose to engage with a potential readership for my book? Is it a worthy ambassador for that enterprise? Put like that (albeit rhetorically), I can't help sinking into self-pitying self-recrimination, and suspect I have been found wanting.

The thing is, I've been nosing around, discovered a few proper blogs and I'm suffering from serious blog envy. It all started with meeting a writer, a real writer, called Tahir Shah, when we shared a cab, a train journey and a lot of literary banter, on the way back from Hay on Wye. Tahir writes beautiful books, makes (no doubt wonderful) films, and belts out beautifully-crafted blog postings as regular as clockwork before breakfast nearly every day. He claims they help him clear his mind. Take a look - Tahir's blog on my blog roll - and you'll see what I mean. If that's to clear his mind for his real writing, imagine what that's like.

For I have realised that my postings have only revealed one side of my book and one side of myself. They have become entramelled in the all-too-easy rut of flippant self-irony. Endemic with we English and often used as a carapace for our fear of being earnest. But that's selling my book short, and allowing only one part of me full ascendancy. What I'm trying to say is the book (and myself) is deeply, hopelessly romantic, and yet I have only presented the cynical face to the world. The class clown, the cheeky chappy whose antics have always masked a highly sentimental soul, constantly upstaged by his noisier twin. In the book I managed to keep them in stable equilibrium, but here the romantic has been compelled to take a back seat. And whilst old cheeky chops won't entirely leave the building, it's time the romantic had his time in the sun. The Keats biography is the perfect excuse to 'out' this side. It's worth a try. I'll see what I can do going forward...

2008-07-28T08:28:00.005+01:00

Keat to the heat

I may have given the impression that I'm something of a one-trick pony in the circus ring of belles lettres. Just how much copy can you squeeze out of the sun, you may well wonder? Well, let me tell you, I've only scratched the surface. But taking stock, and applying some Savlon to that well-scratched sun-swollen surface, I post this from Rome where I have scurried, to embark on my next project. One that has NOTHING TO DO WITH SUNSHINE*. A wee biography of Keats.

And I do mean wee. But he was a small chap and didn't live long, so it may just be possible. I've been hard at it. I've visited his grave, and the excellent museum in the house where he died now dedicated to Keats and Shelley, and the other one. Byron, who I think should be barred for being so mean to poor Keats; but he was a hit with the ladies in life, so is no doubt a posthumous pull. So I came to where he quit his tragic life to start my account of it. Yes, Hampstead (where they have another Keats House) is closer; Moorfields (where he was born) closer still; and Enfield, where he went to school, somewhere north of here and may involve the Northern Line. And I suppose these might all be more logical places to start a biography. But I figured I shouldn't rush my transformation from apostrophiser of suntan oil to serious literary biographer, so thought I'd start by lapping up the 'atmosphere' of Keats' final destination and 35 degrees and sunny. How was I to know Enfield might attempt something of the like itself over the last couple of days? Keats, who gave up medicine for poetry, was conscious that Apollo was the patron god of both. So I thought I'd segue into my new role by paying due reverence to his more famous aspect. Sun god. I'll deal with the mists and mellow fruitfulness in due course... Ciao Ciao for now.

*It may actually have something to do with sunshine. Keats was acutely weather conscious, as his letters reveal. As I've argued in my book and will no doubt trot it out again, To Autumn is partly a celebration of a good-old-fashioned late-summer scorcher, coming after a run of lousy summers. Don't be fooled by thinking Romantics only dug storms; as I will declare, sun-worshipers are the true Romantics of the skies.

2008-07-17T09:12:00.002+01:00

Announcing the next meeting of the Mighall-low club

On Saturday I'll be talking about Sunshine at the Way With Words festival at Dartington in Devon. I'm an old hand at these now, and I'll be doing my song and dance - an illustrated history of sun-worship this time (if the technology works; blind panic staring at the audience and improvising with shadow puppets if it doesn't). And then afterwards sitting hopefully behind a pile of books as they form an orderly queue for me to sign their precious copies. If it goes anything like all the other festivals, the very first people to excitedly present their pages for my scrawl will be long lost relatives. I kid you not, it's happened everytime so far. So this time I'm ready, and have decided on a new marketing plan that more effectively targets the core demographic for my product - people who share my surname. I didn't realise there were so many Mighalls (pronounced 'Mile') out there, but, as I've discovered, a sufficient number are of the book-reading, festival-going type, so they are worth targetting directly.

So , in advance, and to the Devon chapter of the from-this-moment-formed Mighall Low Club, get your tickets now, and see you on Saturday. They'll be lurking by the signing table, bright eyed and expectant, as they reveal their special secret and our unique bond. I'll daub some tosh about to 'auntie Angela, long-lost relative', and wonder if they'll ever read it. The book, that is. A doubt does occasionally trouble me about a vainglorious desire to be read and loved and, more importantly, purchased, for disinterested rather than probably spurious quasi-genealogical reasons. But it is but momentary. Whatever it takes. Once my official tour is over I will systematically go through the telephone books of all major cities, cold call all the Mighalls and ask them if they are interested in a book about sunshine by someone who bears their surname. Based on results so far, I'll be laughing. Mighall 'Low?'. Well, it is rather, but a man's gotta live.

2008-07-09T17:04:00.004+01:00

Inside

OK. I’d held off commenting, but a serious soaking, from which I’m still squelching prompts me to post on this awful weather. Maybe my expectations had been substantially lowered after the disgrace of last year. Perhaps the near miraculous completion of Glastonbury and most of Wimbledon without significant meteorological molestation had lulled me into a false sense of security, and to believe in summer once more. Not a corker or a scorcher, but a workable, I-can-live-with-that version of the kind of weather children’s books and advertisers suggest should happen at this time of year. But it changed at the weekend and an alarming sense of déjà vu is creeping in from last year, and I feel duty bound to comment.

At first I manage to rise above it, and accept that into this life and onto our gardens some rain must fall. But far too much has now fallen on mine. What irks most is the return to ‘inside’ as our allotted sphere and condition of life. There’s a awful lot of inside in this country. If an Englishman’s home is his castle then it is one nearly constantly under siege. True, some people appear to be quite happy with this, and, as if there was not enough genuine inside to go round, they choose to spend hours watching morons self-incarcerated in fish-bowl prisons of discount fame on the goggle box.

But I’m not a fan of inside. I’d got used to outside, and was enjoying it. Meals tasted good under balmy air each evening. BBQ charcoals were not allowed to pass their sell-by date, and were even replenished. Garden furniture got used to not being moved in and out each day, and the grass started to assume my favourite shade: digestive biscuit. Life slipped through the door we'd left open while we were outside.

As the snails re-claim the courtyard, and chlorophyll the grass, I have to accept there are fewer excuses for not tending to my blog. And so, for all our sakes, let’s pray for a prompt end to inside.

2008-07-03T17:31:00.005+01:00

How many suns does it take to stage a scientific debate?

Last night I appeared at an event called The Sunshine Fix at the DANA Centre, in London's Science Museum. I was there to cover the cultural and historical aspects, while real scientific experts explained the physiological and psychological reasons behind our love for the sun. There was quite a good turn out, which was split into two groups and rotated around we experts.

In my groups it was all sweetness and light. Ours was a happy sun, welcomed by many who shared my rather disgruntled view of our stingy sunshine quota. And it wasn't just me inciting them. I shared the floor with a nice chap called Lance Workman, an evolutionary psychologist from Bath Spa University who has been researching SAD. I didn't know this, but the UK has the highest rate of (self-reported) SAD sufferers in the world. Even worse than those at higher latitudes. We also have the most unpredictable weather. To two are not unrelated. We are also known as a nation of whingers (as was pointed out to general agreement), so maybe we have to take this with a pinch of salt. If there was a pathological condition we could self-report on grumbling about late trains, or tutting when people push in front of us in queues, we'd no doubt display epidemic occurrences of this. Yet everyone seemed to have a positive view of the sun, or if they didn't they kept schtum.

When the groups came together, and I caught the tail-end of the other experts' session, another sun came into view. A sun of death, to be feared and avoided, and against which we must all protect ourselves or suffer the consequences. An American dermatologist was holding forth by satellite on the perils of sun-exposure. The smiles soon fell from out faces. Could this be the same sun I wondered to myself? The sun of micro-molecular mysteries revealing itself in mutated forms deep beneath the dermis, to be anathematised by the white-coated ones (the counterparts of those who encouraged us to sunbathe in the first place not 60 years ago)? Or the sun I could still see lighting up the smiles of those enjoying a South Kensignton summer evening as they dawdled past the Centre?

2008-06-29T10:11:00.007+01:00

Northern Sky

In response to my last posting, whinging about the usual non-appearance of the sun on what's supposed to be his big day, the summer solstice, a friend wondered why I had personified the sun as male. I remarked that I was following accepted, and near-universal, convention, as formalised in the Greco-Roman deities Helios and Apollo, or the eastern Shamesh, Mithras or Surya. But on investigation (in that bullshitter's bible, Wikipedia), I discover quite a few cultures personified their solar deities as female. Including, intriguingly, the Germanic solar deity, Sol, otherwise known as Sunna or Frau Sunne. Incidentally, the Norse tradition has another sun god, Freya who is also the god of rain. Bloody typical. We in the north can't just have a god responsible for sun like they do down south. I suppose because there was not enough work to go round, and he had to lend all the other stormy, rainy, thundery colleagues a hand with their workload to justify his post. Sunny spells with intermittent showers, the celestial weather forecast since time immemorial. But I digress.

I do find the idea of old Frau Sunne rather intriguing, and, in my experience, more plausible than the Classical tradition of the sun god, riding his shiny red boy-racer chariot across the heavens each day, and sending phallic rays down to fructify mother earth. It all makes sense now. The sun of the north, the sun of my sky, is most definitely female. Take today, I went to bed last night fully expecting the sun to be shining, as suggested in the weather forecast. But here we are, past 10.30 and I'm still waiting for Frau Sunne to turn up. Looking at the revised forecast I find that she, or at least her meteorological handmaidens, have changed their mind. A woman's prerogative, supposedly, on both counts. As the Monkees so eloquently put it, 'When I wanted sunshine, I got rain'. Needless to say, I'm not a believer. Not when it comes to weather forecasts, and well...

Now, please don't mistake this for a cheap misogynist rant. Take it rather as the tragic lament of a sensitive sun-worshipping romantic who is unlucky in both love and sunshine, and finds the fact that our ancestors thought Sunne was a Frau confirmation of a big theme in my book. A book I describe as 'an open love letter to the most fickle mistress northern man ever served'. I wanted to call the book Sunshine: A Love Affair (but my publishers knew better, and consequently you are more likely to find it, if at all, in 'biography', or even 'personal development' [yuk] than where it should be CULTURAL FEKKIN HISTORY; but that's a rant for another day). I have a whole chapter on love and sunshine, and why all those pop songs and before them poems, find the weather a perfect metaphor for the highs and lows of love. I'll sign off by quoting myself from that chapter: "Weather must surely be the most baffling, tricksy, and infuriating realm of experience to have tasked the intellect, patience or reason of man, from the very dawn of time. After love, of course.". I'll leave my post now, but intend to return to this theme another day. I don't think I've exhausted it, it's just that I have to go upstairs and close the skylight through which rainy Freya, who has come in the stead of Frau Sunne, is now tinkling. TBC...

2008-06-21T20:44:00.004+01:00

All Stice and no Sol (once again)

It's the longest day, in the northern hemisphere, and with tedious inevitability the sun refuses to show up for the third year running. Solstice means the time when the sun appears to stand still at the very high point of its 'journey' across the heavens. So he should be there, in his own spotlight, taking a bow from his adorers at the very pinnacle of his journey across the heavens, and his victory over darkness. Stonehenge, one of the most impressive megalithic structures in the world, whose solar and astrological alignment betrays a profound significance at which we con only guess, and whose construction took centuries of extraordinary effort and ingenuity clouded in the mists of time. As such, it must be the most redundant public edifice the other side of the Millennium Dome.

For if solstice means sun standing still, our sun has been standing still behind a filthy great bank of cloud, and it's high time he showed a bit more consideration. But can we really expect more, when the odds are so heavily stacked against us? Here's a depressing little historical snippet from my book: our word 'sky' derives from the Old Norse word for 'cloud'. And what do our more fortunate Latin neighbours further south call their sky? The same word for 'heaven'. Whilst they beheld an infinite dome of celestial blue with a golden god riding across it, we looked up and saw, well, very little, and went down the pub. Small wonder the British are known for melancholia, and an urgent need to escape. One in ten British nationals live abroad: the favoured destinations Australia and Spain.

2008-06-15T17:21:00.006+01:00

Wish you were here?

A snap shot from my holiday. This is Malaga airport, and yours truly making the most of the last drop of sunshine before returning to the grey. With an hour to kill and the sun still beating down at 19.30, I managed to find the last patch, next at the corner of a car park, on the edge of a building site. It is part of my creed that sunshine can turn the meanest scrap of land into a corner of paradise, but this was pushing it. The security guard opposite hand me down as a suspicious character, and kept muttering into his walkie-talkie with officious intent. I was almost looking forward to being detained and grilled, so I could claim a martyrdom for the sunshine cause - harassment in the lawful course of my obsession -; but then the signal went up that Spain had beaten Sweden in some football match, and he even gave me a thumbs up and left me alone. He to his pleasures me to mine. An unusual snapshot from a holiday, perhaps, but for me a fitting souvenir from the land of solar abundance.

2008-06-01T18:38:00.005+01:00

Making Hay while the sun shone

Just back from Hay-one-Wye literary festival, where I was spectacularly inappropriately dressed. I have devised an outfit as part of my 'brand' for my public promotional performances. It is composed entirely of blue and yellow, and includes yellow canvas sneakers. You can imagine what colour they are now, as it has rained every day bar one at Hay, and the local fire brigade had to pump the site to stop it disappearing. Whilst grungy musos and young folk will wallow with glee in the mud at Glasto, but we sensitive literary types have to maintain some standards.

Well this getup certainly raised a few eyebrows, as did the bright yellow flip flops I adopted once the sneakers were cacked in brown. When asked why I was in flip flops while everyone else was in wellies, I quipped: when they said we want you to talk at Hay-on-Wye, I thought they said Hawaii, and dressed accordingly. Yes, it didn't get a laugh then either. Which is unfortunate, as it was on live national radio, albeit at something like 3am. Graveyard shift, or what the BBC called 'up all night at Hay'. This, let me tell you, was rather a surreal expereince. It ran from 1.00 to 5.00 on Radio Five Live, and involved bantering away about books with the nice folk from the BBC and the Festival, and took place in this caravan parked in a muddy field. This caravan combined the cosy kitchy domestic of the usual granny-shunting, country-road-blocking, bungalow on wheels you'd expect of a caravan, with the high-tech gubbins of a BBC recording studios. A bit like those units spies and criminals have in movies, when they are monitoring people, but with a toaster, a jar of Mellow Birds and a pair of Marigold gloves drapped over a tap.

As the night wore on, the cosy domesticity overtook the high-tech, and I began to relax, be myself rather than on my best behavior. Being yourself is not a bad thing on the radio if it means opening up and giving a natural performance. In my case, however, it meant cracking corny jokes and snerking at double entendres that would escape Finbar Saunders. In short, enjoying myself immensely. What this will do in the interests of 'promotion' is any one's guess. Although I'm not sure how many sun-worshippers listeners avidly tuning in at 4.00 am on a weekday I'm likely to alienate with my wittering anyway. In all, not a bad way to round off my first Hay Festival. And the sun shone the day I was there.

2008-05-22T09:08:00.003+01:00

Sunny spells more powerful than magic ones as Sunshine whops Harry Potter's speccy wizard butt.

Forgive me. I've just heard my beach stunt on Broadway Market for the last bank holiday was so successful it's given me best-seller status*, with my book OUTSELLING THE LATEST HARRY POTTER*. Yes, whilst the latest wizard waffle was published last summer, with a huge international advertising budget behind it, my book has been out 3 sunny weeks now, has had as much marketing spend as the local scout jamboree, yet has pipped the speccy spellster's latest in the best-seller charts*. You'd crow too if it happened to you.

East Londoners are voting with their feet evidently. Not for them the pot-boiling puerility of the Rowling industry, but honest local fare, by local authors pouring their honest heart-felt toil into their works. Supporting local produce, full of hearty, heart-warming, nourishment. Nurtured by the benevolent rays of the East End sun, and fanned by the gentle zephyrs of amateur publicity puffing. Is it too far fetched to see this as the spirit of the Blitz reasserting itself? Plucky East Enders standing up to the boastful boschfulness of the publishing megabrands. Resiting the tyrannical doodlebugging carpet-bombing tactics of the sinister book-peddlers, who'd have us believe there is only one book in the world (or 2 counting the Da Vinci Crud). Well, that won't happen here, and the mega-sales* sensation of the Sunshine spirit of independence and integrity has proven this.

Let us go forward together.

* At the Broadway Bookshop, based upon sales to date. All statements are accurate at time of posting, and are based upon information provided by the Broadway Bookshop. The author is wholly responsible for all hyperbole, self-engrandisement and potential defamation of respected members of the publishing industry, and his views noway reflect those of the Broadway Bookshop or its subsidiaries. All hyperbole, self-engrandisement and defamation are the result of a hangover. The supplier of the alcohol The London Review of Books Bookshop, where the author ligged a fair amount of free plonk last night, is not responsible for the author's condition and resulting views. It is however responsible for not having a copy of his book, and being rather sniffy about whether they would stock it or not. Which led him to seek solace in the bottle they so readily plied at their event. Indirectly therefore, scarcity of book and abundance of wine resulted in the author's need to assert his worth in this posting.

2008-05-13T20:02:00.005+01:00

Another mist opportunity: the curse continues

I have always wanted to see St Ives, and for two main reasons: the famous light upon which an artistic school was founded; and the famous Lighthouse which Virginia Woolf used as the central motif of her novel To the Lighthouse. A book partly about the disappointments of the unpredictable British climate, whose opening passage I use as the epigraph to my first chapter. The first of many cruel ironies.

And so I finally got to St Ives this weekend, using my appearance at the Daphne du Maurier Festival in Fowey, and the hottest, sunniest weekend of the year so far as the perfect opportunity to see both light and Lighthouse in their elements. As the whole of the country blazed under cloudless skies, as London saw 26 degrees, Brighton 27, other parts of Cornwall around the same, St Ives remained in a sepulchral sea mist which meant I was lucky to see my hand in front of my face. Light, famous or otherwise, was in scarce supply. Two items of news were repeatedly vouchsafed me throughout my increasingly hopeless day: that it had been lovely there yesterday; and that few had seen the like of such fog before in spring time. It was all down to the hot weather reacting with the sea. Strangely enough, none of this offered me much consolation. Nor did the news that back in London, indeed other parts of the county, were having a fine day of it; nor that it would be lovely there tomorrow. Today I was in St Ives, tomorrow I wouldn't be. No doubt I would be somewhere that would be experiencing snow of such profusion that the saltiest old sea dog among had n'ere seen the like, man and boy, while the rest of the county sweltered.

Why did I stick around? Because like a berk I believed some of the other folk who told me it would clear by 1.00 ... 3.00... 4.00... an ever retreating horizon of delusional hope. And there was my long-anticipated trip to the Lighthouse. About 4.00, the sun did try to peep through, so we got in the car and headed off to Godrevy, to see the Lighthouse close up. Don't get me wrong. I quite like fog. It's so rare in London now I rather regret it, and often wish we could have a good old-fashioned pea-souper. But there is a time and a place for everything, and the time for fog is not May, when the rest of the country is in bikinis, and you are stumbling perilously close to a cliff edge staring forlornly into a bank of swirling stuff and half expecting an enormous Hound with flashing eyes to come bounding towards you and rip your flippin throat out. I know I'm a hopeless land lubber, but correct me if I'm wrong, i thought the whole point of a lighthouse is that you can see it. In any conditions. I kid you not, I couldn't see a bloody thing, and muttered a silent prayer for those in peril on the sea along with my curses for the merry dance I'd been led on that day. And to cap it all, the chirpy twonk of a DJ based in London played sunshine records for the next hour on our drive out and wouldn't shut his trap about the glorious day we'd all been having.

I had not had my vision.

2008-05-05T17:03:00.016+01:00

O, we did like to be beside the seaside

The launch of Sunshine at the Broadway Bookshop on Saturday was a roaring success. Friends and punters turned up, books were sold. Someone tried to nick the yellow icecream tricycle kindly lent by Lock7 cafe and bike shop to drum up trade. A two year old knocked over my sand castle (I'm thinking of doing a Charles Atlas course to square up to him). Folk got drunk, and the beach was left in chaos by the end of the day.

But best of all, the kind old sun put his kiss-me-quick hat on, and kep it on all day. Kissed us all, and bestowed his blessings on a day dedicated to his celebration.

Hip Hip Horray.

2008-05-02T08:37:00.002+01:00

If I don't get a tan soon my credibility (such as it is), will be in shreds

Yesterday my long-awaited book about Sunshine was published, and the world fell silent with awe. Well, it fell silent. I managed to find one copy in a bookshop in central London, which, of course, I maneuvered into a more favourable position on the racks. No doubt it has been shifted back to its original place by now, and I can see this turning into a fun sport over the coming months. Eventually they will set guards over it, which will make it look more important, and so achieve my ends. Whatever it takes.

But, my main concern at the moment is my pallor. How will my public take me seriously as an expert on sunshine, and defiant champion sun-worshipper, if I remain the colour of old M&S underpants in need of a good boil? Next week I'll be giving a talk at the Daphne Du Maurier Festival in Fowey, Cornwall, and if the sun don't come out before then I'll be denounced publicly as a fraud. Go on a sunbed councils one friend. Go get sprayed another. It's too late for a sunbed. It takes a few weeks to build up to a tan, and, anyway, it's not the same. As for being sprayed. I did that once, and, I'm in no hurry to repeat this.

I was writing a piece for Vogue on the history of the suntan. The Vogue name worked its magic, and got me an interview with the CEO of St Tropez spray tan, and a sample all-over paint job from none other than Posh Spice's personal sprayer. I knew you'd be impressed. Yet, it couldn't have been less glamorous. There I was, in big pants and what looked like a pair of plastic incontinence pants on my head, being given 'definition' (a six pack by the trompe l'oeil of the tanster's craft), for three days of rusty smeardom smelling like an old biscuit tin. O the glamour. And what kind of message would that be? They'd see through it immediately. No. I can't do it. It's real or nothing. I can but pray for sun soon, and toast myself into a presentable state to meet my public. With a tan they might not even recognise me in that bookshop, too.

2008-04-30T21:49:00.005+01:00

The face and dress sense for radio

I doubt if since the days when male presenters wore full evening dress at the BBC has someone cared so much about his appearance on radio. I'm on radio tomorrow, talking about my book Sunshine (which, incidentally, was Metro non-fiction book of the week today: http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/books/article.html?in_article_id=145309&in_page_id=28), and I'm as concerned as much about how I look as what I say. Why? The presenter is Robert Elms, a hero of mine, who, since he wrote in The Face, back in the day, has been a prime pontificator on stylish clobber and I rather fear I will not measure up to his exacting standards. Elms is obsessed about togs as I am about the sun. His book, The Way We Wore told the story of what it was like to grow up when dressing up mattered. I reviewed it in the Independent: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4159/is_20050424/ai_n14598703 because the world he described was a world I once knew. I hope I haven't completely gone gently into that good night of style oblivion, and so find this a daunting prospect. It's hard enough on live radio suppressing the desire to say something rude, or worrying about how crap your voice sounds, without worrying whether the presenter is shooting withering glances at your get up, or tutting at the presentation of your cuffs.

I'm sure he'll be a gent. But all the same, I'm tempted to conduct the whole interview under a buttoned up mackintosh. I bleedin need it in this weather. Will the sun never shine again?

2008-04-26T08:09:00.007+01:00

Drop everything sun-lovers, it's time to show our true national colours

Bright red and puffy by the end of the day. The forecasters, appear to have got it right for once, and have hoisted the happy flag (left) above the grey turrets of this isle and promised us the hottest day of the year so far. But it's not going to last. By tomorrow it'll be business as bloody usual in bunker Britain. So here is our chance to show a scornful world that there is at least one Olympic event at which we can excel (German challenges excepting) - freestyle making-the-most-of sunshine. We'll take it on the beaches, take it in the parks, in our gardens, anywhere and everywhere the sun bestows its blessings today. By jingo we deserve it after last year, and sincerely hope this is not another nugget of fool's gold, an ignis fatuous of summer promise, raising our hope for a scorcher, only to find us in September saying, well, we had one nice day in April, do you remember?

Summer is a game of two halves. It's time to kick off in style.

2008-04-19T17:13:00.006+01:00

Guaranteed Sunshine at the Broadway Bank Holiday Beach Bonanza

A Bank Holiday weekend looms, and if the current weather is anything to go by, will typically thwart the cherised hopes of a sun-starved nation. But, despair not. A jolly day at the seaside, offering all the traditional delights of a traditional British Bank Holiday, with the addition of GUARANTEED SUNSHINE can be had on Saturday May 3rd in front of The Broadway Bookshop, Broadway Market, London E8.

To celebrate the publication of my book Sunshine, the 8ft by 3.5ft of pavement belonging to the Bookshop will be transformed into an urban beach with a difference. It will be the smallest and most depressingly British urban beach in London. Not your trendy, Shoreditch, meterosexual chillout ambient vibefest, but a plucky British seaside stalwart of yesteryear, complete with men in knotted hankies, belles in kiss-me-quicks, wind-breakers, tartan rugs, thermos flasks and 'musn't grumbles'. Hell, I'm not even sure we will have any sand. But it's the spirit that counts. And by golly, we'll have bags of that down Broadway that day. Weather permitting? Pah! We'll bring our own, sir.

So, stop me and buy one at: The Broadway Bookshop, Broadway Market, London E8; Saturday May 3rd, 10.30 - until I get moved on by the Council. Broadway Market: It’s so bracing.

2008-04-13T11:24:00.005+01:00

The rain from Spain must have followed my plane

I'm cursed. I've just come back from Madrid, where it rained for nearly the whole time. The first few days were lovely, there first really hot sun they had had. How lucky I was, they told me. But then, I suppose my luck ran out, and was washed down the drain with persistent, near perpetual pissing down. Inky skies and overflowing gutters is not what I've come to expect from Madrid. Not what I expect from a holiday, full stop. When I board a plane it is to outsource that big yellow thing we don't have here, and it just isn't a holiday unless I get it. Call me superficial. Declaim on the architectural gems, masterpiece-stocked museums, and culinary bounties of the great cities of the world; but, as the world shrinks, British food gets better, and the Internet allows us to roam the globe from the comfort of an armchair, the ultimate need, the ultimate elusive entity is sunshine. Especially for me.

And especially now. I had gone to Madrid to get my fix, after a long winter, and to get a publicity tan. How can I promote my book about sunshine, claiming to be an authority and world-class professional sun-worshipper if i'm as peely wally as an old potato? Well that particular plan came to nought. For five days I was treated to near-Biblical downpours. If my face is any darker, it's from the raging apoplexy of righteous indignation I've whipped myself into at my bad luck. That or rust.

And on the 6th day, the clouds departed. But, alas, me with them. I swear we towed the bastard things back with us. The skies over Gatwick looked suspiciously familiar, and welcomed me back by resuming their business on my head. God, I need a holiday.

2008-04-10T11:55:00.002+01:00

Sunshine guaranteed for May 1st 2008

May 1st is an auspicious day. It is the day of local elections, and our future happiness will be held in our trembling hands. Will that day be respendent with effulgent radiance, or be clouded with ignorance, short-sightedness and self-interest? It is entirely up to you and your fellow citizens.

And yet, I behold a path to happiness shining clearly. A yellow brick road leading to a happy sunny land. Not to the polling booth - for, in truth, it makes little difference who gets his or her snout in the trough, the pigs always end up walking on 2 legs and re-writing what they scrawled on their manifesto walls - no, to the local bookstore, where your friendly bookvender will be happy to furnish you for a very modest sum a freshly minted copy of Sunshine: One man's search for happiness: the essential sun-worsphipper's companion. Published that very day, and the pious labour of my own humble hands.

It is high time I stepped forward and introduced myself properly, declared my interests, and declaimed from my solar solar box the virtues and values, features and benefits, even the Unique Selling Points of my particular product. Unique indeed. For it is the very first book to attempt to explain our love of sunshine. To explore why it makes us happy. Why some of us might be addicted to it, and why we have so much to thank the nudists for.

Over the coming weeks I'll be bringing forth shiny nuggets about and from the book, with regular features such as The Confessions of a sun-worshipper (mostly the same old tat I've been peddling in this blog for years); The Helioholism Hall of Fame (celebrating the heroes of extreme sun-worship); and a regular spot called Pop Goes the Sunshine (featuring the sunniest spells from the world of popular culture). How exciting is all this? So, on May 1st there is only one party, one candidate, one decision. Vote for Sunshine, and contribute to my holiday home in the sun.

2008-04-07T12:55:00.004+01:00

Con-sol-ation: snow in April is not such a bad sign

Despair not, sun-lovers. As one swallow does not a summer make, so a rather chilly spring does not necessarily portend a ropey summer. Summer is a game of two halves, and, as we know from experience, an early burst of promise can so easily fail to be sustained.

Last year is a classic example of this principle. A spectacular April, beguiling us with false promise. How me must have said to ourselves, boy o boy, if this is April, how good must the rest of the summer be? Alas, the rest is history. April was our summer. The clouds mustered by early May, and the rain didn't stop until mid to late August. How better to have snow in April and a scorcher to follow. Not naturally an optimist, and lacking any real meteorological nouse, I do have a long memory when it comes to summer performances, and can offer crumbs of comfort from the archives of obsession. The spring of 1994, I recall, wasn't much to right home about, but delivered a rather fine summer. 2006, gave us a miserable spring (the wettest since the 18th centry), but a corker of a summer.

Take sol-ace my friends. The current can only be good news. This optimism has nothing to do with the fact that I write from Spain, where I had 26 degrees and blue skies while Britain shivvered. I write to consol (with sun in Spanish), not to gloat. Honest.

2008-03-28T20:15:00.004Z

Daylight saving? What about sunlight saving policy?

This weekend will see the start of British Summer Time. Officially, that is. As the winds bully and bluster us, and the freezing rain pelts down relentlessly, it requires extraordinary faith to see but the faintest glimmer at the end of winter's tunnel.

But it does set me thinking, and winging, and therefore blogging. If officialdom is prepared to notice the sun, and how it does play quite an important part in our lives, and if it can establish measures to save daylight (that grey stuff straggling meagerly down through the interminable stodge of our sky), then why can't it take seriously Sunlight Saving and Sharing policies? What good is extra daylight if if all it reveals is grumpy grey? How much more enlightened would be a policy that recognises it's not light per se we like, but sunshine. The real stuff, good and strong and not sieved through the devil's sock we call our sky?

I refer, of course, to my modest proposals for Solar Flexi-Time being adopted in this country. These have been devised to address the abuses arising from the current Sod's Legislation that sunny days invariably occur during the working week, and that, come the weekend, the skies are as black as our barbecue prospects. Absenteeism currently soars during a heatwave, indicating a grass roots disgruntlement with the current situation. So why not allow employees to slope off to parks and beaches whenever the sun shines, and to make up the workload when the clouds return? As they no doubt will. Imagine the good health of the economy if we'd all worked through last 'summer'. And if we have a fine one this year, then it's only fair. Over time it would find its level, and make most of us a good deal happier. A well-sunned, happy workforce is a productive workforce. So SAVE OUR SUNSHINE.

2008-03-20T08:06:00.003Z

Rejoice: It's National Sunshine Day

Today is the Vernal Equinox. The day, as my druidic advisers inform me, when the 'the light is in the ascendancy and first matches strength with the darkness, and the young sun reaches maturity on winning this annual clash of horns'. Got that? I prefer to look on it as the sun's coming of age party. Or ancestors solemnised this important date with their ceremonies; but we, cosseted sophisticates, have lost touch with the solar rhythms, and the sun has forsaken us. Look at that sky today? Dismal. And what does this foretell for the summer? Well, there is no reason for us to prance around in woods, naked except for white flowing robes which scarcely conceal the perky outlines of Ingrid Pitt (in her younger days), or that saucy one with the weird eyes who always gets vampirized. Although, if you do, let me know when and where. The sun can still be welcomed back and encouraged by modern means. We can celebrate the good old current bun's return by wearing a piece of yellow, smiling a bit, and with a few sunny pop songs.

There's plenty of them. Pop loves the sun. And to prove it, none other than Nick Reynolds, the High Priest of Heliotastic Hi-Fi, has sprinkled some sonic solar scorchers into his weekly show, to get you hipsters humming and hymning the sun on this, his very special day. Check out show 51, the equinox extravaganza, and let the sunshine in with style.

2008-03-16T11:27:00.001Z

Sunshine, not Moonshine is what London wants

After much deliberation I have decided to stand for London Mayor. http://www.londonelectsyou.co.uk/MemberProfile.aspx?member=402395

Londonelectsyou are allowing Londoners to vote for real people - instead of self-serving politickers out to feather their own nests, feed their newts or afford better hair-control products - and enable candidates to put on the agenda policies that really matter to London. It also provides a soap box for every mountebank and self-promoter to step on to and spout his own brand of moonshine to the people. Needless to say, I mount my solar soapbox out of the purest motives, and to help bring sunshine, not moonshine to path the grey streets of London with sparkling sunlit gold.

Sunshine is the one thing that unites, excites and delights London. It brings us out on the streets (which is more than can be said for politics or polling days), crowding the parks and urban beaches, the city squares at lunchtimes and the pub pavements in the evenings. LONDON LOVES SUNSHINE, and London will have Sunshine if it votes for me: standing as The Sunshine Superman at http://www.londonelectsyou.co.uk/MemberProfile.aspx?member=402395

So vote, sun-lovers (you can vote for the real scoundrels on the day), voting for me helps publicise the current solar rights abuses London and the whole of the UK suffer from currently. Do your bit to let the sunshine in, and ensure the Sun'll Come Out Tomorrow (or rather May 1st), in old London Town.

2008-03-13T10:36:00.000Z

When destiny called: the founding of my sunshine crusade

People ask me, Helioholic, how long have you known solar activism was your vocation? I smile benignly, and recall the following moment of ephinay.

I must have been about 6. Like most children, I nurtured dreams about what I wanted to be when I grew up. These included the usual things like spy, detective and rock star; but before that I, like so many young boys, formed my aspirations on the football pitch. But unusually, I wasn’t interested in being a star striker, or spectacular goalie, or any of those chaps sharing the glory. I wanted to be the guy getting ALL the attention.

It must have been around 1974 (the annus mirabilis of the profession) when I saw my first match or news coverage, and I knew what I wanted to be. Not a striker, but a streaker. I didn’t understand he wasn't actually an official part of the proceedings, or that streaking wasn’t actually a profession. More of a calling. And it called to me.

So I decided to give it a go. It was early one Sunday, and the sun was shining, when I set off starkers to do a circuit of the cul-de-sac on which we lived. I’m not sure there were many witnesses to my maiden voyage in unclothed expression. There was one that I know of. My brother, who promptly marched to my parents and grassed me up. With bare-faced cheek I flatly denied it, and somehow convinced them of the absurdity of the claim.

From then onwards, I knew streaking was illegal, had its perils (exposure in so many senses), and was not as rewarding as one might imagine. But I also knew my destiny was to express myself in the great outdoors, and to help others enjoy the benefits of sunshine in a (legal) minimum of clothing.

Streaking may (alas) be a thing of the past, but sunshine is part of the glorious future.

2008-03-09T09:47:00.000Z

Soundtrack to a scorcher: second installment

Another of the essential listening tracks for encouraging and celebrating the weather we all love.

Mr Blue Sky by The Electric Light Orchestra (1978).

I hated this song when it first came out. I liked the Police and Blondie, and these guys were big hairy twerps who wore bow ties. But it has grown on me over the years. It nudged its way into my affection with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, when it was used for the trailer.

It's a silly song. The sun Has Got His Hat On in beirdy-weirdy guise. Grandiose, operatic, inflated (making Queen look like a bunch of minimalist shoe-gazers), and paints rather childish in its personification of the elements. A picture book view of the weather. But why not? It expresses a very English response to that amazing feeling you get when the bloody grey clouds that have laid siege to our island for months eventually lift, and you are reminded that skies are also available in blue. Everyone smiles, the colours are brighter, and we are given a glimpse of how our world might be. That's worth singing about, and, yes, it does make you feel rather childish. Perhaps reminding us of a time when it was always sunny and summers were always dependable. Sigh.

2008-02-28T10:55:00.000Z

Soundtrack to a scorcher: my favourite sunshine songs
Greetings sunny pop-pickers, in an effort to encourage the sun this summer here's the first installment on the heliotastic hymns that light up the canon of pop. Sunshine Superman by Donovan (1966)

Sunshine came softly through my a-window today
Could've tripped out easy a-but I've a-changed my ways.

It surely captures something of the unique feeling of sunshine, and how it can make magical an ordinary day. The jangling sitar opening, and psychedelic lyrics open a sunny window onto a moment in popular cultural history. By equating hedonistic sun-worship with psychedelic head-expansion, it reminds us that, even pallid, puny Scottish folksters could feel the rays emanating from California. The first brand of LSD was called 'Sunshine' (1967), and all those flipped out hippies soaking up the sun and giving out the love in Golden Gate park were simply Letting the Sunshine In.

Turn on, tan-in, flop out.

2008-02-22T18:12:00.000Z

5th-dimensional Ultraviolet Light baths? Bring 'em on
I've just learned of the following, and am decidedly miffed:

"Last week the Earth was bathed with a colossal influx of 5th-Dimensional Ultraviolet Light. This shaft of Light interpenetrated every electron of precious Life energy for approximately 17 hours. This powerful influx of Light accelerated one-millionfold the Etheric frequencies of the mental and emotional strata of Earth. During that time, this acceleration had the effect of amplifying Humanity's thoughts and emotions one-millionfold as well.

Lightworkers around the world took advantage of this rare opportunity and empowered hopes and dreams for themselves and for all Life on this sweet Earth. Now what should we anticipate from this gift of Light? How can we expand the beneficial effects?..." [It continues at:
http://www.thecosmicchurchoftruth.net/art-whattoexpect.htm ]

What's more to the point: how did I miss this? What on earth was I doing when, this cosmic sun-bathing opportunity presented itself? I suppose it's for the best. I don't think I have an SPF high enough for this stuff by the sound of it. And I suppose the same rule as US Sci-Fi films applies here, anyway - that aliens and SurroundScreen Armageddon only visit the US of A. Bloody typical...

2008-02-21T14:12:00.000Z

This is mad. It's February, and I've just heard an ice cream van trundling down the Hackney Road.

Scorcherwatch 2008 is on. Send in sightings, hearings and intimations of Summer to us here...

2008-02-13T16:46:00.000Z

Flip Flops in February

I trust the picture says it all....

2008-02-09T19:14:00.000Z

That's the spirit: East Londoners get some early training for the summer season (London Fields, 09/02/08)

What a weekend, and what a gladdening spectacle. The sun fhas been glorious for the last 3 days. It topped fifteen degrees in London, and it's still only February. I spent most of it basking in my open window, shielded from the breeze, and feeling the quickening of my blood as the sun did its magic. The sun is too low on the horizon for UV rays to penetrate the atmosphere at this time of year, but something was working to lift me up. Maybe the warmth, or the idea of it. What does it matter? it did the trick.

As the sun slipped below the flats opposite I went in pursuit, and found it and what it bestowed blessing East London. Broadway Market was teeming with trendies lapping it up as they spilled beerily across the the road on Saturday. London Fields was packed with sun-baskers - can they be bathers if fully clothed? - who moved around the park in pursuit of the sun. A reminder, if one were needed, that this is truly a nation of sun-worshipers determined not to waste a drop. Even in February.

I'd love to state that this bodes well for the Summer Campaign, but am all too aware of the false promise of last spring. The warmest sunniest April was followed by an unspeakable excuse for a summer. Let's ensure it get's it right this year...

2008-02-06T09:03:00.000Z

Don't ban patio heaters, ban the lousy summers that compel us to need them

As if it wasn't bad enough that they hoard all the sunshine, other nations of the EU now want to remove our lifeline to the lifestyle they take for granted. A call to ban patio heaters outside pubs in Europe: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7219565.stm

Yes, they are the mark of our shame, branding us as a nation denied its right to a proper summer. Yes, we'd like to relegate them to the museum, and proudly instal where they once stood, the brazen barbecue that betokens successful outside living. But until we have the kind of summers those other nations who are plotting this ban luxuriate in (and even complain of), then we must cling to these ignoble crutches like drowning men to the wreckage. Let those same sun-rich plutocrats spend a summer attempting to enjoy their cafe society without these solar safety nets, and see if they are still so keen to ban them.

Last 'summer', I spotted an heroic sight outside a London pub. The parasols were being used as umbrellas, the patio heaters were on full blast, and a plucky crowd sat through the deluge determined to enjoy their drink outside. And this was before the smoking ban. These are our rights. And we will fight to the death to defend them...

2008-01-31T10:41:00.000Z

Tough on clouds and the causes of clouds

Whilst we must do everything we can to actively encourage sunshine this summer, the struggle is not an easy or an equal one. Clouds so often have the upper hand, and worse - are actively encouraged in some quarters. We must discourage the kind of thinking that risks leading us into yet another solar downturn, and extra vigilant in the current climate to guard against sentiments that pose a threat to our solar liberty.

Although we disagree with the The Cloud Appreciation Society on fundamentals, we respect their right to exist and to pursue their own agenda. The official body no doubt has pure (albeit misguided) intentions. But any movement will have its extremists; and we must not provide a platform for radical nebulists who are doing their utmost to undermine the nation's natural antipathy to grey sky thinking, thus allowing outside aggressors (frontal depressions) to lay siege to our skies. It is surely no accident that the year after the Cloudspotters published their manifesto was one of the wettest, cloudiest summers on record.

But not Cloudspotters alone. Those who have gardens and think more of their lawns than the nation's solar liberties, or those who complain it’s too hot after three days of sun, or claim we ‘wouldn't appreciated it if it was like this all the time’, should be forced to keep their views to themselves, instead of encouraging the kind of weather that needs no encouragement in these isles. Remember - Careless talk costs summers.

To learn more about our views on Clouds consult our Frequently Asked Questions

http://www.lovesunshine.org/

2008-01-23T10:02:00.001Z

Rage, rage against the dying of the light

The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
Wordsworth (‘Immortality Ode’)

January 23rd has been calculated to be the most miserable day of the year. Christmas has gone, the credit card bills arrive just as the new year resolutions depart, the weather is bleak, the nights still long. It was the day I was born. In a suburb of Croydon. A suburb of a suburb. It pissed down with rain that night. It’s a trauma I’ve never quite got over. Rudely ejected into a cold, wet, dark world. I wanted to climb back into the warm, and have been yearning for the warmth ever since.

Last year I did the sensible thing on my birthday (the big 4-0), and flitted off to then sun. A week spent in sun-lounger stupour under the blue skies of Sharm el Sheikh was the perfect remedy for anniversary angst.

This year, I’m in London, having failed to secure a sunlit birthday bolthole. But also with important work to do. As chief architect of the sunlit utopia we must build, there is much to turn my hand to in these dim dark days. The solar struggle goes on…

2008-01-13T19:46:00.000Z

Announcing the launch of Scorcher 2008

The UK summer of 2007 was unforgivable - the worst since records began. Those who weren't flooded out of their house and home, suffered the misery of perpetual grey skies, driving rain, and day-time television. Life was put on hold for a whole season. Instead of BBQs we had bed socks; instead of sandals we had souwesters; and we were forced to cower inside instead of seizing the day beneath the benign face of Heaven.

This simply cannot be allowed to happen again.

LoveSunshine believes sunshine in summer is a right, not a privilege, and that nothing should come between a Brit and his or her sunshine. We demand our sacred rights to go out in the midday sun, and broil ourselves as red as the Roast Beef of Old England. Our Scorcher 2008 Campaign is dedicated to defending these rights, and doing everything in our power to ensure our enjoyment of a just and equitable allocation of sunshine.

There is no room for complacency. Nothing can be left to chance within the current climate. Over the coming months we will be taking measures to promote our cause, lobby for our demands, and make this and every summer from now on a scorcher.

These are early days, and there is much to be done: but the first blow has been struck. Follow the campaign here, spread the word, and join the crusade for a scorcher.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are reaching for that star...
http://www.lovesunshine.org/

2006-09-03T14:52:00.000+01:00

Park life

The sun sneaks through in scattered shreds, and I greedily grab the rare rays it affords. My morning ritual is now all but a fond memory. But one morning last week I woke up to pale blue cloudless skies, and seized the opportunity by taking the early bus and seeking out my usual patch. No chance. Too low at that time, I moved on to Russell Square, big enough surely to have sufficient patches to share. But too tree-filled to allow any of the benches to be graced by the late-rising sun. The grass, which, 4 weeks ago now, would have been straw dry and accommodating, was lush, green and decidely damp and muddy. And so I moved on, northwards, to fresh squares and pastures new.

I found a patch in an unfamiliar square, with a bench facing a scrub of grass. Filled with pigeons. It's an occupational hazard of an obsessive urban sun-seeker to become aquainted with the habits of these birds. And there are few things more belittlig to the male ego than to watch them at their sports. As Blur put it, 'they love a bit of it'. They most surely do, but can't always get it. Sigh.

In fact rarely get it, from what I have observed. You usually see it in spring time. The males, puffed up and cocky, with tails splayed and chests out, they strut their stuff before the females like so many feathered Travoltas. They spin and preen, do their little twirls, to the complete indifference and uninterest of the females. Working their avian mojo, it takes the male a short while to notice the fact that the female has moved on. He attempts to recover his composure, gathers himself together, and pursues the next babe who wanders into view. The old game of courtship.

But what I find most depressing to contemplate is the fact that I have never once seen a male pigeon successfully copping off with one of his conquests. There's plenty of the bloody things about, so the pigeon race must be replenished from somewhere. Just not from any of the ones I've spied on my benchside sun vigils over the years. Perhaps I'm in the wrong parks. Me and the pigeons both. In other parks, in other parts of the city, in other cities, pigeons and not doubt humans enjoy fulfilling romantic relations. Watching these unfortunate males strikes a chord in me and I look away. It's bad enough seeing happy couples, without having loser pigeons to remind me of my prospects.

The ones I saw this particular morning were a sad and shabby crew. The dregs of what Londoners unaffectionately call flying rats. They were huddled together in a mass in front of my feet, and looked like they had been sleeping there all night. I'm not really an expert on pigeon sex, beyond the folorn attempted scuffles I'd observed over the years. But I assumed they were seasonal, and that it was in the spring that a young pigeon's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of tail(feather). If it is, then this one chap i had observed had found some viagra in his millet. While the rest were dozily suppine he was trying his luck with all he surveyed. He'd dispensed with all pretence of flamenco courtship (perhaps for the reasons I'd noted), and simply tried to climb on to anything he could find. He didn't have any more luck than his more ostentatious brethren, but I had to admire his nerve. A last ditch attempt while the sun shone.... Oh, God.

2006-08-18T18:13:00.000+01:00

Requiescat - English Summer MMVI

Our glorious summer, of which we had such high hopes, and which showed such promise, appears to have given up on us. As I survey the brooding black clouds that have hung over us for nearly 2 weeks now, it but remains for me to scatter some earth on its coffin, and say a few words about what was and what might have been.

Very short and very sweet is the obvious way of characterising it. There was no spring to speak of, but plenty to moan about. It was the wettest May since 1773, and we scarcely saw a glimpse of the sun for about six weeks together. Even those who aren't really big sun fans were complaining about the lack of sun, so, for once, it wasn't just me being impossibly demanding. It was official. The miserable weather got to as far as early June without any sign of relenting, and it looked like this summer was going to join the roll call of shame (along with 2004, 02, 2000) by being monumentally crap.

And then miraculously the clouds cleared, revealing that skies could also come in blue in this country. The sun came out, kept coming out and actually stuck around. For weeks. The temperatures soared, records fell, and we found ourselves enjoying that rare and glorious thing, a 'scorcher'. Or what is merely called a 'summer' elsewhere.

The weather transformed London and the way it went about its life. Buses that were usually full to bursting in the evening rush hour went past nearly empty. People were out making the most of the weather. The atmosphere was palpable. People relaxed, smiled, enjoyed themselves. In short, they lived.

That's what I mourn most, as I look out over the courtyard where two weeks ago I sunbathed and bar b qued with my neighbours: life. Lived to the full. Spontaneously, out of doors, in the heat, and then long into the fragrant night. BBQs or picnic every night. Too hot to sleep. Then why bother. People just hung out on the streets. On weekdays. They just sat on steps of squares, chatting late into the night. Like they do in other countries, and without the need for alcohol. For a few weeks we glimpsed another world, and knew what it must be like to live with a degree of certainty. Not ruled and persistently frustrated by a capricious, vicious, predicably unpredicatable climate.

And just as we were getting used to it, it was snatched untimely from our grasp. It surprised us with its arrival, and has dumbfounded me with its premature departure. I feel cheated, indignant and frustrated. I loved this summer, because of the way it came from nowhere and with such force. And now it has gone. I was looking forward to its slow maturing. Its slipping gracefully into a well-earned autumnal repose. I was speculating on whether I would be able to accept the coming of winter with a bit more equanimity than usual. I believed the hype put about by the media that August was going to continue if not exceed the record-beating efforts of June and July. 'If you think it's hot now', one of them asserted, 'you ain't seen nothing yet'. And I let myself believe them.

Which is why I'll be stuck in grey rainy England for the August bank holiday next weekend. The first time in about 6 years. When the temperatures really soared in July I'd been out of the country. Worse, I'd been in Spain where it was ... I can hardly say it without spitting venom ... where it was cloudy and a bit drizzly the day the records fell in Britain. As August is usually hotter than July I was determined not to get caught out again. Idiot.

And so another week starts under grey, grumpy clouds. With grey grumpy people shuffling back to work. A sense of unfinished business, unfulfilled potential hangs over us. It really feels like summer has gone, autumn will be soon be here, and something truly special has died.

2006-08-17T14:22:00.000+01:00

Waiting for my man (Helios)

The sun returned yesterday. Albeit fleetingly. By lunchtime it was pissing down. The sky was streaked with milky plumes, and there was a decidedly autumnal turn to the air. The long hot days of last month now seem like a distant dream.

I had established a ritual in those balmy days of getting an early bus to work, and sitting in the sun for about an hour and a half in a small park in Bloomsbury. Some days the sun was hot enough to prickle the skin and even tan at 7.45 am. A great way to start the day.

Yesterday I visited my favourite spot for the first time in what must be nearly 2 weeks, and the sun was barely touching my usual bench. I sat there shivering for ten minutes before it got into its stride.

This square, in fact most of Bloomsbury, is a haven for junkies. Spilling over from St Giles (Centre Point), and pushed South by the on-going overhaul of Kings Cross. You get used to seeing them about, urgently intent at 7.30 am. As I sat, shivering on my bench, waiting for my own man (Helios), I recognized an affinity with them. My sun devotion a dependency not so very different from theirs, and often taking me to great lengths to get my ‘fix’. My Turkey needed seriously warming up that morning.

A few weeks ago there would have been a choice of benches if my favourite spot (the Early Riser Special) was occupied. Today only my usual spot was barely straining into the sun, and was sprawlingly occupied by what looked like a vagrant. Shabby genteel, Dickens would have called him. He seemed engrossed in his book about chess moves, so I perched on the far end of my sunspot. And then the sun rose higher, and along with it the unmistakable aroma of street-sleeping hygienic neglect. A “Hot Tramp” may have turned Mr Bowie on (each to his own), but it made my vigil on MY sunspot deeply unpleasant for about another ten minutes. Before I could shuffle over to another that had finally been reclaimed by the late-summer sun. I can see my devotion is going to have its trials as the sun retreats this year.

Today is ropey. Rain. Overcast, with the occasional glimmer of hope. What has happened to our glorious summer? I despair...

2006-08-15T18:59:00.000+01:00

My first posting, although it will be the culmination of many weeks, months even years of ruminations. I should have started this earlier, but I now have a purpose for a spot, so today seems a good time to dip my toe into the blogsphere.

The purpose. I’m trying to put together a website devoted to celebrating and sharing sunshine. It will be at www.lovesunshine.org when I have content, design, functionality, layout and everything else sorted. I’m making very slow progress as I try to scale a near vertical learning curve equipped with near zero resources, less understanding and no common sense or technical ability. O, and very little time. I do have lots of wonderful chums ‘though, who are giving me a leg up as I attempt to get my head round the various decisions and scary complexities involved in going public in hyperspace. If it’s still called that.

Why today? Because I can have a good old moan about the weather. The glorious and decidedly uncharacteristic summer we were enjoying until a few days ago has given up on us, and left me - a hopeless sun-addict - speechless with indignation. Or vociferous rather. The newspapers had all been predicting an August even hotter than the record-breaking July, and I was looking forward to another month of blue skies, scorching sun, outdoor living, accomplished BBQs, and a life fulfilled by a proper allocation of regular reliable sunshine. An exotic window had opened to us in England. Affording a glimpse of another world. One we usually only see in brief tantalizing episodes – the ‘sunny spells’ that fleetingly cast their glamour over us here – or when we outsource the stuff overseas. I was just getting used to planning things, eating outdoors, and prostrating myself on grass the colour and texture of Wheatabix. I like grass to look like Wheatabix. It’s the sign of a good summer.

But after a few bouts of torrential rain, and a few days of grim, grey porridgey skies we are slipping into an alarmingly familiar pattern of business-as-bloody-borringly usual in grey old London. It’s starting to restore the green, the grumpy faces, and already the women are wearing their winter styles. A Pox on it. (The weather was exactly like this exactly 2 years ago today.*)

And why am I particularly miffed today? Because my special sun-hood I ordered for working outside in the sunshine arrived today. Just to rub it in. I ordered it weeks ago when, after about 7 weeks of reliable sunshine, I wasn’t getting a stroke of work done, and thought I ought to find a way of typing and tanning at the same time. As it is simply impossible for me to be inside when the sun shines outside this thing should be the answer to my prayers. Should have been. My prayers now focus on the return of the sunshine. Please, weather gods. Just one last, sustained, and truly infernal, burst before we go into winter. It would mean so much to me…

*How do I remember what the weather was like 2 years ago? Because:(a) I’m an obsessive. I have a personal and personally aggrieved recollection of what our summers were like stretching back to at least 1982. (I can recall them if anyone’s interested. Which is unlikely. I discovered recently how obsessive this is when I distributed a questionnaire on people’s attitude to sunshine, which included a question about summers past. And few could even remember what last summer was like.) (b) Two years ago today I had my first date with my last girlfriend – who cruelly dumped me back in February. And so I have a particularly acute, and self-indulgently melancholy, recollection of the day. The summer – which was bleedin lousy that year – gave up completely that day (with a few brief showings later on). So I’m stricken with foreboding as well as a general brooding sulkiness recalling what might have been. The great dreamy promise that glimmered out that day and the early days and weeks following. The fools gold of an ultimately doomed relationship. The clouds got in the way.