Summer's Almost Gone ........

AS another great British summer staggers in slow decline off the stage of seasons to let autumn try it’s hand at resurrecting the ghost of former glories, you can’t help but be left wondering if the nostalgic and lazy sun-soaked days and evenings of yore will ever return to this ‘green and pleasant land’ again.

Even though it’s only August, already the nights are drawing in, the temperatures are dropping, and any remaining hope of a ‘proper summer’ has been washed down the drains along with the constant and dispiriting downpours.


A National Addiction 

We’re obsessed with the weather in this country and rightly so. The fact that this little island of ours has, or used to have, four distinctive and uniquely beautiful seasons in the space of a year is an inspiration in itself.

The annual cycle that starts with the elusive promise of spring, before heading into the rude health and unbounded joy of of summer, is complemented perfectly by the reflective mists and ‘mellow fruitfulness’ of Autumn, that lead into the bleak, unforgiving clarity of winter.

The British seasons and weather have served as a rich muse for generations of artists, but can the same be said anymore?


The Fifth Season 

For a while now the characteristics that have defined each season have become blurred around the edges as spring, summer, autumn, and winter all seep into one another in the space of a single day, to create something that is not quite either season, but a new kind of mongrel hybrid that acts as an all-inclusive fifth season, lacking in any identity of its own. 

How many days have passed this summer in a limbo-like haze, where the continual low pressure turns the country into a stagnating cauldron of oppressive heat and dismal drizzle, lorded over by unrelenting grey skies that keep any redemptive patches of bright blue sky safely under lock and key.

What happened to all the winter snow? And as for Jack Frost I think he must be on the missing person’s list.


Anyway the Wind Blows

Do we get our allotted share of crisp autumn days anymore, where the sun lies just pale enough in the sky to allow the exhilarating chill and bite of autumn to prosper, but bright enough to bathe the land in hues of the richest red.

And is spring still a time of resurrected hopes and the reawakening of the earth, or is it just another season that has forsaken it’s identity in a melting plot of meteorological misfortune and madness.

Now I know I may be guilty of waxing lyrical about the seasons, but absence makes the heart grow fonder, and it seems like such a long time since spring, summer, autumn, and winter have behaved accordingly and acted in a traditional sense.

Cynics will say I’m just being nostalgic, environmentalists will say blame the polluters, and realists will suggest the weather is changing simply because the earth has being getting warmer since the time of the last ice age.


Something of a Bad Spell 

However, I like to indulge in my own fanciful theory, about what only the other day some buffoon of a weatherman called ‘the gorgeous unpredictability of British weather’.

Does the current stormy climate of life in general on the British Isle effect the weather, or is the weather partly responsible for the prevalent mood of negativity, miserabilism and self-defeatism that seems to hold Britain in it’s sway in the year of our lord 2011?

Myself, I think it’s a bit of both, with the two feeding of one another like a vicious circle. 

For example, we moan just about everything in this country, and a bad spell in the weather is just more ammunition for us to throw our hands in the air and despair. Hence the formation of more bad weather in a mutual exchange of negativity between us mere mortals and the elements. 

I now it’s a bizarre theory, but maybe in a parallel universe couldn’t the harsh unpredictability and strain of unease and dread that runs right through our society like a dark and diseased undercurrent, lead to the thought-formation of weather which simply acts as a reflecting mirror of our own collective modern-day lack of identity and meaning? Something akin to a fifth season?

Anyhow, Just a thought! But like Dylan once said, “You don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows.”