I have recently returned from two weeks spent in a remote cottage in the Highlands. In the house there is neither running water nor electricity, and the nearest road is an hour’s walk over the hills. Water has to be collected in buckets from the nearby burn; toilets are emptied in a multi-staged system that eschews the luxury of a flush. There is no phone signal.
The first week was sunny, and I swam in the sea, and sat outside with cups of tea, and read books. The second week was cold and rainy, so I swam (but enjoyed it less) and sat outside wearing two fleeces until my hands were too cold to turn the pages, and lurked indoors when the rain got heavy or the midges midged excessively.
Perhaps you are not a member of my family, and this setup strikes you as idyllic; perhaps the idea of going somewhere colder than home is your worst nightmare. But for me, these are just summer holidays. Or, if you prefer, “summer holidays” – the quotation marks necessary to mark the distance between the intention of the expression, and how it is put into practice in my life.
The discrepancy between summer holidays as I experience them and as they are presented to me as a concept has its own familiar and comforting dissonance. This summer I read articles about bikinis and chilled picnic food and how to stay cool on the beach in both the shiny new magazines I had bought for the train.
My daughter, in turn, excavated the suitcase of ancient comics in the bedroom, and in my old Just Seventeens, and the Mizzes, which were first read by my sister, she could learn about bikinis and picnic food and how to stay cool on the beach (and how to find a summer boyfriend – they always made it sound so easy). All advice that I have obediently absorbed, all information that bears an airy irrelevance to any kind of summer holiday, any kind of life, I have ever had.
There is a pattern of awareness to growing up, a process of learning to frame your own experiences and put them into a gradually widening context. First thinking your way of doing things is absolutely normal; next learning that other people do things their own (the wrong) way; and then meeting and learning about more and more people. As you discover how common your experiences are –or aren’t – you find out that some seemingly impossible scenarios are just marketers’ propaganda while others are in fact the widely accepted norm.
The unwavering, blissful monotony of the magazine summers I read about shifted over the years from something I understood to be total fantasy to something I recognised as an idealised facsimile of Other People’s Summers. The fantasy summer and its vicarious pleasures became a tangible and necessary element of my enjoyment of my own reality.
Living in Scotland, you get used to “summer” being more of a theory than a season: a state of mind, perhaps a couple of days in May. A kind of mathematical symbol that is meaningless alone but whose proximity alters the value of its surroundings. “Summer holidays” are the long ones; “summer nights” are also the long ones; “summer sales” are the ones full of horrible clothes that are too brightly coloured, and which you can’t wear with a cardigan and tights.
Always, though, there is a vague understanding that for some people, and in some places, “summer” means a protracted and reliable period of time in which warm and even hot weather can be anticipated, and activities planned accordingly. Just as some people have happy marriages, and delightful children, and swimming pools, some have summer holidays, without inverted commas.
My vocabulary of summer was learned in childhood – from books, TV, films. Thrilling, exotic, with a tinge of fiction – Orangina and sprinklers and summer camp and barbecues, words I could taste before I had pinned down their meaning. Believing in these other summers required me to have faith in the existence of a mirror world where a girl my age spent her summer holidays in shorts and a T-shirt rather than wellies and a thermal vest. The comparison threw into relief my own reality: clarified it, made it seem unique, authentic.
The magazine version of summer is easily dismissed, the standard shorthand that frames my imperfect/perfect, chilly, wild summers as somehow ersatz. Rather than a bikini, I swim in an unflattering one-piece; in place of chilled picnic food I carry fun-sized Mars bars in my cagoule pouch. But summer can be categorised with other indicators of assumed success – work, family, happiness – it is easy to assume everyone else is doing it right. Perhaps, in fact, we are all each other’s myth, each other’s mirror.
• This article was amended on 20 July 2015 to replace the photograph, which did not illustrate the property described.
