When summer felt like forever
bracketed by long road trips on hot vinyl seats in the back of the family car. Hours of gazing at blurred white lines and flashing trees were broken occasionally by an altercation with one of my two siblings and the subsequent admonishment from the front seats.
Parents drank beer poured from glass flagons, we drank milkshakes from tall paper cups. We listened to Rod Stewart’s Atlantic Crossing, and we all ate a lot of charred sausages and spuds cooked in tin foil.
Applying sun block when I was a child was viewed in the same vein as wearing seatbelts or lifejackets or smoking away from babies; it felt like it might make sense, but no-one was going to be upset if you didn’t do it.
I am fair skinned, so the early summers of my life involved the shedding of several layers of burned skin. It was customary to peel a full layer of intact red crust from my nose at least once a year.
Our family lived in Germany for a few years when I was a kid. They had a different take on summer over there; more orderly, more militaristic. Swimming was done at a complex where poolside plots were demarcated with a precision and fervour only employed by surgeons and bomb disposal units in the Antipodes. My siblings and I got used to being stared at in public when going barefoot or, Gott in Himmel, without T-shirts. We missed the Kiwi summer way of life.
School was wasted on me, never more so than in summer. It may have had something to do with the heat and a desire to be elsewhere, but I suspect it had a lot more to do with the dire lack of enthusiasm with which the priests delivered their lessons. Their monotony was unwavering, regardless of the season.
Summers as an early teen were marked by the proliferation of pastel coloured zinc sunblock, BMX bikes and, oddly, Eddie Rabbitt’s I Love A Rainy Night. Not because I’m fond of it, but because I have an enduring memory of it drifting in and out of earshot as it was carried by a light northerly from the direction of the local skating rink.
Late teen summers will always be associated with my first vehicle, a 1964 orange VW kombi van. It was one part rust to three parts metal and getting a warrant of fitness required a long drive to a backwater mechanic who overlooked its flaws in return for a dozen Rheinecks (for the blissfully uninitiated, this was a dreadful alcoholic liquid once sold as lager).
On Friday afternoons the van would carry nine of us over the Remutakas to Castlepoint, where we’d split our days between sand and