Well here it is again folks, like a recurring congenital illness that gets worse every year and that you know deep down inside will finish you off some day; British summertime. Beer gardens, public parks and any spare patch of wasteland will soon be awash with pretty girls in summer dresses, blokes in whatever t-shirt their girlfriends have bought them from H&M this year, and countless sub-human scallie scumbags with their shirts off and their hands shoved down the front of their tracksuit bottoms.
To add insult to injury every bar, pub and club will invariably be pumping out the latest summer hit, invoking the listener to ‘reach for the sky’, ‘open up for a brand new day’, ‘taste the sunshine’, amongst other equally banal affirmations with a thudding, brain tumour inducing 4/4 beat.
The impact of the credit crunch has apparently doubled bookings for local seaside resorts over the past two months as people decide a weekend in Bognor Regis is just as good as strolling by Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia. Recession or no recession, this is akin to suggesting that watching back to back episodes of Horne and Corden on a faltering laptop is on a par with taking in Ian McKellen’s ‘Macbeth’ at the Old Vic.
Although this move towards local holidays and nightlife is undoubtedly good news for people working in places like Bournemouth, Scarborough and Morecombe, the idea of transporting the narcissistic nutcases who make the yearly jaunt to places like Magaluf, Ibiza and Gran Canaria to the English seaside is an unappealing prospect at best. One thing is for sure, purveyors of cheap drugs, Stella Artois and prostitutes will be quids in this summer, just as NHS A&E rooms will no doubt be awash with stab wounds and STDs.
The approaching summer sits ominously upon my shoulder like a gibbering ape wearing a Hawaiian shirt with a Bacardi Breezer in it’s hand. Awful, awful, awful. Why do people yearn for this time of year like weeds in the soil straining at the first rays of sun to fall upon their desperate, desolate corner of the earth?
The unbearable, oppressive heat brings out the crazies, the ‘party animals’, the pricks and I just can’t stand it.
How can a man think straight as a thousand watt bulb beams down on his head through a cloudless burning blue sky and girls walk by dressed in all manner of whorish garb? It’s enough to turn even the most sane person into David Berkowitz.
I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. When I fuck I feel like I’m about to have a heart attack. And everyone is so god-damn happy about it. It’s like the final scene in ’Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, can’t anyone else see that the world has gone crazy?
At least England aren’t in a major sporting competition. Whenever that happens it feels like the last days of Rome, Sodom and Pompeii realised as a Blackpool waxwork, fucking hell on earth. And in all honesty only the brain of a seriously dehydrated human being could ever have believed Tim Henman was capable of winning a major tennis tournament.
Yet summers’ approach creeps ever nearer, and like finding blood in your toilet bowl, the portents are not good.
A few items spotted in the park on the first sunny day of the year;
A girl doing a backwards spider walk into a pile of rubbish.
Two tramps lounging amongst the young white flesh like predatory dogs.
A girl almost brained by a savagely kicked football and no apology proffered by the culprit.
Rubbish everywhere.
Some morons playing with a bright red Frisbee as if the Holocaust never happened.
A halfwit taking a piss against a tree at 11am in the morning.
A white Rasta tunelessly banging some kind of ethnic drum. He trips over an uneven piece of ground but turns his stumble into some kind of ’cool guy’ lolloping walking style/dance move.
So very many people with their tops off.
I’m too ashamed to go naked from the waist up, or the waist down for that matter. Ashamed of my decaying body, bloated and stretched in some places. Skinny, ludicrous and pale in others. And the whole damn mess hanging together like a Francis Bacon painting of a slaughtered sow.
The sweat pours off me. Why is no-one else sweating!?
My blood is all wrong for this place. Throw me in an ice-bath until October please sir, and tell everyone to go home, lock their doors and be humble and afraid and paranoid and grateful until the snow begins to fall.
Yet for fans of nightlife, and even the most curmudgeonly of folk, there are positives to be garnered from this most dreaded time of year. The majority of old-man pubs will be empty, their clientele to be found lounging on park benches with three litre bottles of white lightning or in Yates’ beer gardens leering at the bare flesh on display and giving off about ‘bloody immigrants’, thus allowing you time and space to read the Guardian weekend supplements in peace.
There is also solace in knowing that the majority of student-ville can be found in Hyde Park listening to their mates playing acoustic guitars over disposable barbecues filled with Quorn sausages, as you hunker down in a darkened room, a wet flannel on your brow, shovelling low grade amphetamines up your nose and listening to Slavoj Zizek lectures and the entire collected soundtrack work of Angelo Badalamenti.
Unity Day is also a highlight on the calendar for most of Leeds’ student population. And although you can’t argue with the ‘hey let’s all get along/I like brown people’ ethos behind the event it’s hard to warm to the site of a couple of hundred pissed up indie kids leaving Hyde Park looking like some kind of landfill to a soundtrack of half-arsed local bands being rock stars for the day (insert fool for a lifetime reference at your leisure). Even more annoying are the host of Glasto-rejects enjoying jazz cigarettes as they juggle, ride unicycles, interpret their emotions through the medium of dance or arse around with those fiery balls on rope; in what universe are any of those talents worth having?
Ladies and gentlemen, by this stage it’s pretty obvious that I enjoy the summertime as much as the crippling comedown from a twelve pill ecstasy binge following a messy break-up. Yet in it’s way it’s hard to begrudge the hip young gunslingers who struggle through the fallow winter months, enduring rain, sleet and snow with only a fuzzy memory of Mr. Sun and his beatific rays of sunshine. Yet for me this is much like having an appreciation of, and even sympathy for, the reasons why someone might turn to a life of crime whilst having nothing but feelings of contempt and fear as a hooded thug mugs you on your way home from the pub.
So people, enjoy it while you can. Cram yourself and your bright coloured glad-rags into every cool pub, club and restaurant that Leeds has to offer this summer. Spend your cash like its 1999, dance, make love and worship the sun like some primal Aztec demagog. Because you and I both know that as quickly as it has arrived it will be gone, leaving only bankruptcy, Chlamydia, sun-burn and a novelty Mexican sombrero full of broken dreams in it’s wake.
