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.

However last week I noticed that the rhythm of “thump, crash, swear and yell” did not come to its usual abrupt ending at half eight, which is when everyone usually leaves for the school run. Instead, the wannabe NBA champion was joined by his little sister, who had decided to take advantage of the sunshine to bring her oboe practice outdoors. The school holidays had begun.

At half past nine, when I joined the Bella Vista PR registration Zoom call, the young musician of the year was still at it.

“Trudy, what is that noise? Have you got the norovirus?” Bella asked, when I turned on my microphone just as the oboe let out a gaseous-sounding whine.

I closed my kitchen window. The oboe noise was muffled but within 10 minutes, it was stiflingly hot. My little Victorian house was built at a time when smog still largely blocked out the sun. It wasn’t built for a 21st-century heatwave. My electric fan just stirred the heat around.

After a whole day of Zoom calls, I opened the kitchen window and the back door again. The sound of oboe practice had been replaced by the roar of a Karcher as someone blasted moss off their patio slabs. And did I detect the scent of lighter fluid on the air? I did. Barbecue season was underway.

As well as having an extension built, the people at the back have had their garden “landscaped” to incorporate a barbecue pit next to our shared fence. Since their garden is twice as long as mine, this means their barbecue is technically closer to my house than their own.

Choking fumes soon filled my kitchen. To begin with, I tried to hint at the problem. I went out into my backyard and coughed loudly enough that I expected Brenda to race across the road with a lateral flow kit. My hint was not taken. Next, I pretended to take a phone call and loudly told my imaginary interlocutor, “I’ll have to move indoors. My neighbour’s barbecue is filling my back yard with smoke.”

The smoke grew thicker and blacker as the young musician of the year’s dad slapped meat on the grill, oblivious to the grey clouds he was sending my way. It wasn’t long before the miasma was spreading up the street. I heard windows being slammed shut, swear-words to make a Nineties stand-up comedian blush and, from two doors to my left, a wail of distress. “My washing!”

The average London garden is not big enough for a barbecue unless you’re going to make a burnt offering to everyone who lives within smoking distance or at least give them written notice so they can bring their sheets indoors.

Mr BBQ continued to flip burgers, which must have been marinated in lighter fluid if the smell and the smoke were anything to go by. But was there any point in going round to complain, I wondered, as I retreated indoors and made sure my own bedroom window was tightly sealed shut. Looking down into the garden, I could see that they were having fun. The young musician of the year was bouncing around with a bun and a squeezy bottle of ketchup. I remembered how much fun it was to have a barbecue when I was a child. I wouldn’t touch burnt food as a rule, but food that had been burnt outdoors! Now that was a real treat.

Perhaps I would pop round in a couple of days and mention that the smoke had been a problem in a friendly sort of way. Perhaps they genuinely didn’t know they were smoking out half the street. Perhaps the dad hadn’t heard us all slamming and swearing. It was possible that he had taken his hearing aids out during his daughter’s oboe practice.

In the end, I didn’t have to say anything. As the wind changed direction and the greasy, grey cloud drifted south towards the bottom end of the terrace, a new chorus of shouting and swearing began. Then Mr Karcher paused in blasting his patio to aim his jet in a different direction. A plume of water glittered as it arched over two gardens like a rainbow to reducing the beastly barbecue to a sizzle.