Summertime, and the livin' is bloody hard.

“Now is the winter of our discontent, Made glorious summer by this sun of York.” So observes Richard, the Duke of Gloucester, in William Shakespeare’s Richard III. Gentle punning (sun/ son), historical accuracy and careful literary analysis aside, the swan of Avon had it all wrong. Summer is not glorious and winter is not a time of discontent. It is precisely the other way round.

Winter is in fact a time of great contentment for me. Luxuriating in the autumnal hangover of crisp leaves, bracing winds and mist-infused mornings, winter represents the delighted apogee of my normally misanthropic, perennially confused, darkly comic bellendry. Who here has not felt some form of fraternal love for one’s fellow man as one stalks the streets for a spell of late-night shopping, safely bathed in the warm, embracing glow of Christmas lights? No, me neither. But I certainly feel good ambling amid the bustling hordes as they try to secure that half-price olisbos for aunt Karen. Winter has my birthday, a time of shared national celebration. Winter has Christmas, Diwali, Hanukkah and Saturnalia. Winter has days off work because a thirty-year-old train carriage buckled and crumpled under the weight of a single snowflake. Winter has hysterical and often hilarious coverage of the snow, safely and easily ignored. Winter has real ale and mulled wine and mulled cider and good food. I’ll stop now, at the risk of coming across as John Major, all warm beer, cricket and heavy-breasted milkmaids cycling over cobblestones in the Cotswolds with a copy of the Daily Telegraph ensconced in their plump décolletage.  

Summer cannot hold a candle to winter. It is the season when humanity crashes and reverse metamorphoses into its very worst incarnation. The terasecond a solitary sunbeam ekes its way through the clouds, chino wankers are out in force, as if there were a whining, nasally alarm system audible only to them, altering their neurological pathways and forcing them into chino shorts, dreadful shoes, and the only Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirt their unemployment benefit allows them to buy. An equally resonant second alarm then rings, bringing the older generations out in force too, deepthroating their ice lollies like they were trying to teach the rest of us an important life lesson, as my eyes feverishly try to escape the eaves of loose body flesh over-spilling the rims of their trousers.

You probably – and correctly – deduced that these sentiments are born from a healthy dollop of envy. As a heavy asthmatic chronically prone to hay fever, I am able to become so infected with various ailments and allergies that Bashar al-Assad turned down the opportunity to weaponise me into a biological WMD for fear it would be too powerful once unleashed. The sun simultaneously stops me getting to sleep in the night and exhausts me in the day. I do not tan; I do not burn. I merely remain the same. Whereas it is simplicity itself to warm myself up in the cold, cooling myself down in the heat is a Sisyphean task. Stupid, pointless insects which exist at no other point in time come into being during the summer and mercilessly attack my Hollywood good looks. I become even more irritable than usual. And if the human race will often strike up a conversation about a bit of a wind or a light drizzle, then they’ll sure as hell make a comment about the sunshine, lovely being the adjective of choice. (I realise I’m operating at some level of meta-, unconscious, hypocritical irony here, but, well, shut up).

Autumn, winter and spring are perfectly fine. Some sunshine is acceptable, too, as long as it doesn’t go above, ooh, 15 degrees. Forgive me: I live in Buxton. It is the highest market town in England. Any amount of rain less than monsoon conditions, and any wind blowing at less than 8 on the Beaufort scale is sure to frighten and confuse me. I don’t have to wait until summer to get intoxicated in some overcrowded beer garden: it is a year-round necessity independent of season. I have consistency on my side: I have always disliked it, and much preferred other seasons and weather systems. Perhaps I am destined to follow the path of Richard in Shakespeare’s imagining of him:

“And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

I am determined to prove a villain

And hate the idle pleasures of these days.”