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.

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...

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.

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...

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...

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.

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....

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

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.

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

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...

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.

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...

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.)

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

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.

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....

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...

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.

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.