Basic B*tch

Summer friends

This one’s for the

summer friends: the thrown-together friends, necessity friends, the kids of your parents’ friends. The best of friends for two or three months of the year in whatever little corner of Kerry, or Clare, or west Cork. The friends who didn’t exist from September, whom you would pick up with again as if no time had passed, come June.

You wouldn’t bother commenting on their new haircut, or glasses, or freshly sprung adolescent facial hair — because that’s not what summer friends are about. In the summer, it’s only the summer that matters.

It’s not like your school buddies — with whom you have shared neighbourhoods, backgrounds, years of birth; they see you in maths classes, and know how often you put up your hand and which (if any) boys from the school down the road fancy you.

Summers were a chance for reinvention

— you could be anyone you wanted to be. I had an entirely different teenage wardrobe for Kerry. I kind of still do. Those long, hot (at least in our memories) summer months yawned ahead of us, full of possibilities for underage drinking/ throwing mackerel at tour buses/making forbidden bonfires.

It was pure and exquisite tedium that forged these friendships, because you never really know someone until you’ve been bored out of your tiny brains with them, sitting in a rain-pelted caravan playing spit. And, once, a jigsaw.

And as we graduated from the beach dunes to the beer-garden bushes, to actual tables, the sweet low-level buzz of boredom persisted — lazy, circular conversations, and comparing the faces you carved into the foil on the neck of your bottle of Bulmers — and I still crave it, when real life gets too real.

I’m sorry for kids now with 4G, no matter how remote their summer location. They will never know that sweet boredom and bittersweet romance of summer friendship. Not really.