If we can’t enjoy the summer, perhaps we can try to dress for it
Three fine days and a thunderstorm,” is how George II is supposed to have characterised the English summer, and the description fits this summer perfectly – if only I could remember the three fine days. I dimly recall a weekend in June when our oldest friends came to stay, and we wore straw hats and sat outside in the sunshine, but that feels as though it happened in another time and a different country.
Since then, there seems to have been nothing but relentless rain. A fine, insidious drizzle alternates with torrents that pour down as though from a celestial hosepipe. The gentle river at the bottom of our garden has burst its banks and creeps inexorably up the lawn, while the laundry drips on the line.
Could the bedraggled gloom of this summer be more a matter of perception than reality? According to the Met Office, this summer has actually been “warmer and dryer than average”. They suggest that news reports of flooding have given an erroneous impression of a “bad summer”. Reading this, I am tempted to emulate Dr Johnson’s brisk riposte to Bishop Berkeley’s theory of subjective idealism (“I refute Berkeley thus,” he said, administering a sharp kick to a large stone), by jumping in our newly formed (and, I hope, temporary) lake.
But since the options for summer holidays are so limited this year, dressing up the sodden reality with a little fantasy escapism might be the best alternative. In fashionable circles, “holidaycore” – or dressing in beachwear while staying at home – is apparently a thing, with terry towelling resort wear hailed in Vogue as the height of chic.
Shakaila Forbes-bell, a fashion psychologist, even argues that “outlandish dressing … can carry a tension-release dimension”. Which is good to know. Though how much tension a terry-towelling romper suit would release, while our kitchen remains swathed in damp towels like an old-fashioned steam laundry, I cannot say for certain.
A more reliable
antidote to stress is that glorious fixture of the summer, the BBC Proms. Even last year’s pandemictruncated season offered consolation in difficult times But as we rejoice in the return of a nearer-to-normal Proms experience, we should remember the courageous musicians of Afghanistan, under threat from the Taliban.
A decade ago, Ahmad Sarmast founded the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, home of Zohra, an orchestra of young women who toured the UK in 2019. Tyrants have always feared the power of music to inspire the human spirit. Sarmast and Zohra join a long tradition of musicians who defy tyranny with harmony. “We will continue to fight the Taliban with the beauty of music,” he says.
The socialite and
amateur jump jockey Broderick Munro-wilson, who has died at the age of 76, was perhaps the last living incarnation of that beloved English figure, the Cad. Accused of caddishness by a judge in 1993, Munrowilson embraced the epithet with enthusiasm: “Of course I’m a cad, all the best men are. And that’s why really nice girls love us.” These days, the Mrs Grundies of social media would cancel a would-be Flashman or Lovelace before he could launch his roistering career. But nice girls of the future may find life strangely duller in the absence of that reprehensible, but entertaining figure, the old-fashioned cad.