20 Glorious (and very British) reasons to be cheerful this summer
WHY is everyone being so glum? Theresa May may have stepped on a garden rake in last week’s election but there are many reasons to squint at life with a merry eye. Here, QUENTIN LETTS lists 20 of them . . .
FEW garden scents are more seductive than that of the philadelphus or mock orange (below, right) with its delicate white flowers and heady fragrance. On a warm summer evening, that gorgeous smell disarms you like a smouldering senorita selling oranges. Ours has just opened its first bud. Heavenly. THE spirit of Manchester after the suicide bomb attack and the sheer grit and bloody-mindedness of the Londoners who stood up to those maniacs who ran amok at Borough Market. I loved that diner who threw punches at the knife-wielding killer, saying ‘ I’m Millwall’. He was determined not to be murdered by an Islamist nutter . . . in an Arsenal shirt. NICK clegg lost his seat in the commons. Hooray! The only drawback is that defeat in Sheffield Hallam means petulant cockerel cleggy will pocket another few thousand pounds of our tax money in a commons redundancy payment — but, heck, it’s worth every penny to be shot of that frightful Remoaner.
Perhaps he and his castanet-clacker wife will now emigrate to the EU, where they plainly feel more at home than in soon-tobe-independent Blighty.
MID-JUNE? Glug glug, it must be Pimm’s. You can legitimately tell your fretting spouse that you are getting your five-aday fruit allowance in a glass — all that cucumber and mint — while picking up a pleasing little buzz. Add gin for extra kick.
SUMMER weddings are a great morale booster. My nephew Hugo is marrying his fantastic girlfriend Bex. And is Prince Harry about to get down on bended knee to that pretty Meghan lass? Wouldn’t that cheer the nation? But my teenage daughters (who adore Harry) hope Meghan might say ‘No’. THE days are still getting longer. Midsummer’s Day is not for another week. Another week, in other words, before Scandinavians go completely berserk.
HOUSE martins swooping and diving around pools of water — acrobatics as good as the Red Arrows.
PRESIDENT Donald Trump may be hinting that he will delay his state visit, but we can surely still enjoy the prospect of imagining him clicking his fingers at a Buckingham Palace banquet and asking the footman for a can of Diet coke. Lefties get so terribly cross about the Donald. They should learn to relish his comic potential instead.
LONDON’S West End has some cracking musicals at present: 42nd Street on Drury Lane, The Girls (about those naked Yorkshire Women’s Institute ladies) at the Phoenix, An American In Paris at the Dominion, School Of Rock at the New London, Miranda Hart ( left) honking away in Annie at the Piccadilly, and more. There is also a feisty On The Town at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, at which pigeons keep cooing to the rhythm of the songs.
YOUNG honeys in summer frocks, their bucks in blazers and the splosh-splosh-splosh of oars at the Henley Royal Regatta. Strike up the Eton Boating Song — if only to enrage the Lefties.
THE mercury is forecast to rise with a vengeance. Time to buy some sun cream and a very British floppy hat. The one downside? That dread phrase ‘I thought we’d have a salad for lunch’. WITH Scots Tory leader Ruth Davidson having outsmarted the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon, the Union looks pretty solid. That means our grandchildren can look forward to keeping the Union Jock — sorry, the Union Jack — as their national flag. Just so long as we never have to see stumpy wee Ruth in a kilt — that might ignite demands for English secession. MANY youngsters may have voted for Jeremy corbyn’s pie-in-thesky manifesto but is it not rather reassuring to see that youth is still idealistic?
In the sordid Blair years, they almost gave up on politics. Students SHOULD be socialist.
The old saying goes: ‘Show me someone under 25 who is not Leftwing and I will show you someone with no heart. Show me someone over 25 who is not Right-wing and I will show you someone with no head.’ THIS year’s strawberry crop looks as if it’s going to be a belter, provided the blinking blackbirds stop pinching them. Time to invest in a cat, maybe.
GCSEs and A-levels are nearly over. Once out of the way, school pupils can go out and get sand between their toes. And teachers can hit the commonroom sherry.
COUNTY show season is in full swing. The Royal Three counties Show opens on Friday. Held at the bottom of the Malvern Hills, it’s a classic example: prize bulls with enormous, er, appendages, hairy-eared farmers, viciously-judged cake competitions, sheep shearing (strapping young shepherds are always popular with the ladies), beer tents, motorcycle display teams, shire horses, funfair rides. The weather might even be kind this year. SUMMER matins: is there anything more deliciously English than the drone of a bumble bee that has wandered through the church’s open doorway on Sunday morning to suck on the altar lilies — or the sound of Trinity hymns (‘ Holy Holy Holy’, ‘ Immortal, Invisible’) drifting out into the churchyard? Pure Betjeman.
NOT long now until the family bucket and spader in August — and that most cherishable of sights, the Englishman in a beach deckchair with Panama hat, short socks, sandals, a fish-paste sandwich in his hand and a developing case of raspberry-ripple sunburn.
FRIDAY week will be our first British Independence Day — the first anniversary of the EU referendum vote. With both the Tory and Labour manifestos supporting a clean Brexit, we should be coming out of the rotten EU, whatever Tony Blair and Sir Richard Branson say. Is it not time for the Government to announce a public competition to design the new, sovereign British passport? RECENT rain has left our rivers running beautifully — almost enough to make me want to take up fishing. The other night, my wife and I had a drink by the bridge at Ross-on-Wye.
Swans glided by. children gambolled in the shallows like something from Enid Blyton. The wind frolicked in the silvery leaves of a spinney on the far bank.
All that while supping a pint of the finest nectar known to man: hand-pulled English bitter.
It was enough to make the most devout mullah turn to hooch — and admit that Britain in June is the Garden of Eden.