For me, today marks the beginning of the summer holidays. But what is the meaning of a family summer? For summer, like Christmas, means the concentration of family time, peaceful or non-peaceful. Everyone is pulled back to the gravitational centre.
It is my time of greatest pleasure – when all the daily arguments disappear. It is true that they are replaced with other kinds of argument, but these arguments are far more low-level, focusing one who got the biggest ice-cream rather than accusations of developmental neglect or spousal failings.
For me, as a divorcee, it is a time of bringing together two families – the children of both marriages. This is rare. Anyone who has divorced and remarried will recognise the pleasure of this – to live the fantasy, however short lived, that you have a single rather than an atomised family, all living under the same roof.
It is also a time when pleasure – like fantasy – is licensed. We live in a guilt-ridden era, where all our earthly delights appear to be guilty ones – whether it is eating a cake, or slobbing down in front of the TV to watch garbage instead of going for a run or reading a novel that is slightly too clever for you to enjoy.
In summer, doing nothing much is allowed. This usually requires you getting away from your own front door, relocating to a place where different rules apply. In this world, if you are lucky, and you don’t have very young kids, your inner sloth will be enabled, if only briefly.
Summer, for some, may also be a time of discovery – possibly the discovery that they don’t actually want to have nothing to do. A time when many people discover that work is meaning for them, and the dream of loafing on a beach is just that – a dream.
Such people go to the beach only to manufacture tasks, schedules and problems out of thin air because, without them, they would be lost. Then they return home and go back to work and enter a recycled fantasy – that they are desperate to go on holiday again. But their problems constitute their lives, and they secretly wouldn’t have it any other way.
Summer, of course, is associated with heat – and therefore time. Sunshine slows events down. Everything becomes sticky and limpid. Minutes stretch into Summer hours. Moments can last for ever. This is the highest summer-state for me – the immolation of self in heat and lassitude. For some this can be hell (see above), but, for me, it is as if I have found my true life and centre, if only for a few weeks.
What else is summer? It is the Beach Boys, always. It is ice-cream and scones, it is bathing suits that no longer fit and sandals that don’t look good with shorts that look even worse. It is blockbuster novels that you have time to read, and the slow drifting of bad foreign pop music across the beach.
It is kites and it is sunburn and sand in the food. It is sea. It is penny falls machines at the amusement arcade. It is photos that, even after all the new technology, are really as crappy as the ones it used to take two weeks to get developed. It is silence. It is repose. It is a mind that is finally still.
Summer, of course, must give way to autumn and winter. Autumn and winter give summer meaning. When we return from summer, we are glad to be home, we newly appreciate the fall of the leaves from the trees and their turning brown, we can thrill to the first frost. Summer is important because it is part of a larger whole. Its beginning is coloured by the prospect of its end. That, above all, is what makes it so precious.
