Jeff Randall, writing in the Telegraph, suggests that we shouldn’t escape yet another wet summer by whizzing off to sunnier climes.
At last, summer is upon us. Schoolchildren are clearing their desks, the Lord’s Test has begun, Royal Birkdale is preparing for next week’s Open championship, Newmarket has switched racing to the July course – and, yes, it’s raining.
As is usual. After fifty British summers, punctuated by the odd wonderful aberration such as 1976, I’m sorely sick of the whole thing. A warm flash of promise in late April and early May is followed by July setting in with its accompaniment of grey skies, torrential rain and floods. Summer, what precious little we are granted, is now over.
By contrast, in Spain, still the most popular holiday destination for British tourists, the sun is hotter than Rafael Nadal’s forehand. On the Costa del Sol yesterday, the temperature hit 32C (90F in old money), compared with 15C in breezy Penzance and just 12C in rain-lashed Edinburgh.
Pissing down in the British Isles or 32C in Spain? No contest, really. Give me Spain every time. I was born to warm my face in the sun, to live where the weather suits my clothes. Wet, dreary Britain, you can keep it.
Apparently I am not alone. The weather has caused Britons to flock to the sun despite the credit crunch.
That is splendid news, too, for those of us (a diminishing band?) who view a summer spent at home as the best antidote to the rat race. For me, Britain’s finest hour comes just as the dash abroad begins. It is only then that one realises how much nicer life would be if our cities were not so crowded.
Being something of a loner myself, I can understand Jeff’s sentiments. I detest crowds. But staying here in Britain and getting rained on day in, day out is not my idea of an antidote. No sooner had we arrived back in the UK from the rather more agreeable climate of the Languedoc Roussillon last month than it pissed down and I was booking a trip back across the channel in August. Fuck staying here. I want some summer. I want to be eating lunch alfresco. I want to feel the warmth of the sun on my skin. I want blue skies, yellow cornfields, the sound of cicadas and mellow evenings. In short, I don’t want this dreary, grey, rain washed overcrowded little island. Fifty years of it is enough.
The searing heat of Andalucia and the Algarve is much over-rated.
No it isn’t. The crowds of Brits is enough to put me off, but the temperature is just about right.
Once your age becomes bigger than your waist, what is attractive about summer begins to change.
No it doesn’t. Every year is a bigger disappointment than the previous one because it is another lost opportunity, another missed chance of warm sunny days that will never come again. Every year I become a little bit more resentful.
Winters are different: a burst of sunshine overseas in the suicide month of February is therapeutic.
Well, yes it can be – it serves though to remind me what I am missing. In this country, we can only hope for decent weather from May to September – three precious months (and even then, people moan about how hot it is). June wasn’t anything to write home about (again) and July is a washout (again). August will be gone before we know it (again), so summer will be a few warm days in September before the descent into winter (again). Summer in this country simply means slightly warmer rain (again).
But I would not swap a summer’s day in Dornoch for a month in Torrevieja.
Just watch me. Well, not perhaps Torrevieja; more a little village in the Languedoc, where the summer starts to show its face in late March and keeps going until early October.
I tend to share Randall’s misanthropy when he talks of crowded airports and tourist destinations. I hate them too. But I hate the dreary climate in this country even more.
This is why, finally, I am leaving. It looks as if (if the plan falls into place) Mrs Longrider and I will be departing these shores for more agreeable climes sometime in September. Finally, I’ll be getting my summer. No crowds for me. A garden full of trees and the loudest noise – apart from next door’s poultry – is the sound of bird song and cicadas.
Jeff can keep these rain drenched isles. Give me thirty degrees in the shade any day.
Which brings us back to the topic of how the sale of Longrider Towers is coming along…?
We have a buyer who would love to buy at the asking price (we were realistic in the first instance). However, the mortgage market is so dire, she cannot raise a mortgage – even if we dropped the price. So, she is going to rent for a year or two in the hope that things will settle down.
On the downside, we can’t release the capital to do some of the things we would like to do to the French property. On the upside, we get to move.
Just got back with the family from Gibraltar. 32 deg C for the past week. Much better IMO than Spain. It may be a small place but there are plenty of excusions and things to do on land and sea.
That would be ‘excursions’ of course!
I’ve not been to Malta, but everyone I’ve spoken to who has, seems to like it.
Have to say I’m with Jeff. I’ve spent the last few years rediscovering parts of this sceptred isle that I hadn’t visited since my childhood… places that are indescribably beautiful. Sod the Languedoc, and give me the deserted desolation of a Yorkshire moor in October.
But then when I do go abroad, I prefer the likes of Austria or Norway to the ‘sun-drenched’ mediterranean climes. Each to their own..
Agreed, there is exquisite scenery in the UK (I have a particular love of the lakes in late summer, early autumn – or the Welsh valleys on a misty morning). I’m not denying it. But I’ve had half a century waiting for summer. I’ve reached the end of my tether.
The Languedoc – or, more precisely, the Larzac – is much like English moorland, but with sunshine.
I’ll spare you a passing thought as I laze in the shade of my walnut tree 😉