Summer is only good when you don’t have to work

With barbecue smoke filling the air, expletive-laden basketball practice and the sound of an oboe causing windy judgement, Trudy Tyler is not a fan of the warmer months. By Christine Manby

(Tom Ford)

Summer. All through the long dark spring we longed for sunnier days and warmer weather. And now they’re here and I’ve remembered that the summer in the UK is only any good when you don’t have to work and you get to spend a month at your beach-front house in Cornwall. Summer in London is not the same at all.

Needless to say, I don’t have a beachfront house in Cornwall. But at least when this year’s heatwave hit, I wasn’t facing a commute. My boss Bella has, in accordance with BoJo’s latest, not-in-the-least-bit-confusing round of Covid-19 directives, decreed that the staff of Bella Vista PR can continue to work from home, provided we all log on for Zoom calls at the beginning and end of each day. Registration, my colleague George calls it.

Morning registration takes place at half-past nine. I used to set an alarm clock for half seven, so that I could lay in bed and check social media while thinking “I really must get up” for another hour, but the people who live in the house behind mine – the ones who had an extension built during the last full lockdown – have moved back in and for the past month their eldest son has been practising shooting hoops in their back garden at seven every day. So now I wake to the sound of a basketball thumping against toughened glass as he misses the hoop and hits the new extension’s fancy patio doors instead. Every time he hits the glass, he mutters an expletive, then his mother opens the kitchen window and swears at him for cursing. I get up much more quickly than I used to.