‘Hot girl summer’? More like ‘blowing my nose on a sock in a Tesco carpark’ summer

I mean, sure, as a perimenopausal woman with hayfever, the summer technically makes it hard for me to do some things: like, you know, breathe, or sleep, or produce what most people would describe as a ‘human’ volume of sweat from my body. But... summer is here!

I don’t know if you noticed but just a quick FYI: summer is here. That’s right, the English summer, it got here in the last couple of weeks, somewhere after the coronation and that one weekend that everyone forgot wasn’t actually a Bank Holiday.

And please understand, I love it. I mean, everyone loves the summer, fine... but I love love the summer. Not just a bit, not just in the casual, take-it-or-leave-it way of someone who lives in a country with things like regular hours of sunlight and government-subsidised fuel bills.

For me, the summer is something I spend the rest of the year poised, lying in wait for. Each one of its much-promised, long-awaited 16-23 days is a sort of vitamin D-induced fever dream that I am determined to squeeze every drop of enjoyment from.

Maybe it’s because I live in the countryside that I feel the return of summer so intensely. Like everyone who pretends not to be scared of cows and can’t call an Uber even if they wanted to, I consider myself deeply connected to the land.

This year, as spring has progressed into winter and then back to spring and then, briefly, back to winter again, I have been walking the valleys of Gloucestershire, obsessively looking for all the ancient signs of summer’s arrival. And as soon as I spotted the very first Instagram reel of someone drinking an Aperol spritz on their decking, I knew: it was here.

All it took was 25 months of winter, I thought to myself, hastily pulling off my winter jumper, and then my other winter jumper, and then the official HMS Navy diving suit inner I wear for the spring. It’s actually a good thing it rained for 11 of them, I laughed aloud, applying cream to the remains of my trench foot, using my winter pelt of toe hair to velcro on my sandals and marching out into the fields. It’s so beautiful, so vernal, so GREEN.

I mean, sure, as a perimenopausal woman with hayfever, the summer technically makes it hard for me to do some things: like, you know, breathe, or sleep, or produce what most people would describe as a “human” volume of sweat from my body.

But actually, nothing makes me more relaxed than a two-month-long unreachable itch in my inner ears, or preparing my beach-ready body by auctioning a kidney on the dark web in order to book a shipping container with a bed in it in Cornwall for a week in August.

OK, yes, it’s true that every year the plants here engage in pollen-based reproduction on a scale that basically amounts to a sort of dendrological sex party, a plant-based Only Fans to which the 16 million of us with hayfever are unwilling subscribers.

But there’s always the old remedies such as eating lots of local honey and you know what, I have it easy. It’s only beech and oak pollen that affect me. Some might say that this is like having tweenagers and only being allergic to two of the Jonas Brothers.

But, very much like the Jonas Brothers, every May just the sight of them – inwardly several hundred years old but outwardly fresh, full of promise and absolutely everywhere – brings me joy, before my face inevitably inflates to three times its normal size and I weep because I just want it to stop.

And that’s before you consider the joy of all the weddings and festivals and school fetes – so many! So many that I won’t have a single weekend to do something boring and predictably enjoyable like sitting inside my house with the curtains drawn eating a Fab lolly in my pants and not speaking to anyone.

Look, if you have never experienced the natural high of consuming warm elderflower cordial and half a packet of anti-histamine to the tune of a local choir singing “Africa” by Toto, then please, do not naysay the English summer to me.

I love it, you see. As the middle of the year approaches, I set out earlier and earlier across the fields with the dog, feeling at one with nature, listening to podcasts that aren’t even about murder.

I stick my legs in the river that I once tweeted about wild swimming in but in fact that one time I tried I got stuck with my wetsuit half way up and three nice women in bobble hats had to help me put my arse away.

I’m basically Elizabeth Bennet, I think. The 2005 version, with Matthew Macfadyen (Darcy not Wambsgans, for the avoidance of doubt). I’m definitely not like the 1995 Mrs Bennet, my brain says as I return home, one side of my face hot and wobbling. It has to say this quite loudly, over the noise of me shrieking and pouring local honey directly onto my eyeballs, but it’s important to listen to your inner voice.

I tell friends abroad, those who have only ever visited the UK briefly, how excited I am about a summer staycation. I get voice notes in reply, and I know from their tone that they are squinting at their phone disbelievingly. Really? Summer in England?

Look, I tell them, testily. You with your piazzas and functioning public transport infrastructure and your easy (some might say lazy) access to luxury goods like tomatoes and cheese sandwiches: you just don’t understand.

I mean, sure, the English summer can be unreliable. It can disappear for weeks on end just when you need it most, and then reappear in September and pretend it was around the whole time. But you don’t really know the UK summer, I mumble thickly, parked up at the big Tesco after another dog walk, rifling through my bag for tissues and then pausing to blow my nose on a child’s sock.

People only ever say nice things about it on social media, and that’s because it’s objectively lovely and not in any way because we’re worried that if we don’t it will leave and might never come back.

So, until next Thursday (at least!) the summer is here. And until then, you better believe I’ll be out roaming the fields, stepping carefully among the skylarks and the orchids and a bunch of other plants that I have identified on an app through half swollen shut eyelids. The sun is out! Summer is here! And I just hope everyone enjoys it as much as I do.