Thank God Summer Is Over

You have started turning the Big Light on at 4PM. Prestige TV shows are rolling out promotional materials ahead of their new seasons, premiering precisely when they know you’ll crave them most. People are tweeting about soup. It is happening: Autumn, same as it ever was, come to envelop us all in earthy tones and a powerful reluctance to do anything that isn’t located within a convenient radius of bed. And thank fuck for that. 

In many ways, 2021 isn’t happening – it never happened. It’s a thought experiment that failed to get off the ground, a promise of freedom undelivered. Caught in the famously unprecedented throes of 2020, we thought: ‘It cannot possibly get worse than this. Surely, 2021 will be better.’ Alas… 

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It’s not that this year has been worse, so much as it’s been brutally underwhelming. The anticipation: infinite. The vibes: off. In a Britain where expectations are already stacked poorly against the odds of reality, the faint hope that the warmer months might claw some pleasure back after a winter lockdown that – anecdotally speaking – saw the entire population want to swan dive into a bed of nails, receded into a resigned sort of ‘ah, right, OK then’. 

The overnight moment of release “freedom day” touted by the Tory government (obviously) never really materialised, replaced instead by a stumbling and awkward return to kind of sort of doing things a bit more than before. Much of the UK was still in full lockdown well into spring, with restrictions in place until at least mid-July. Most people in their twenties were still only half-vaccinated by September. The “pingdemic” happened. In a near-biblical act of poetic justice, the sun abandoned London for the vast majority of the year. The summer of wild abandon we had been longing for since March 2020 – endless hot weeks filled with endless hot nights, stretching into the rosy light of sunrise as our nostrils filled with bus exhaust, boiling sewage and the lager breath of a thousand acquaintances who ceased to exist for 16 months – never came. There have been snatches of joy here and there, but nothing consistent enough to blow the cobwebs off completely. And now it’s October. 

Along with freshers flu and the primal urge to listen to Sufjan Stevens, autumn brings with it the permission to give up – but in a nice way! The weather won’t be good for another six months, so that’s one less thing to cross your fingers about. Once the temperature drops below 14 degrees at night it instantly becomes acceptable to say “no” to anything that requires doing your hair.

The unique sense of possibility attached to summer – which, in the case of this summer, usually ended in disappointment – can now give way to the comfort and security of knowing that from now on you’ll only be doing what is absolutely necessary. Which is mostly: sitting on the couch, with someone you know reasonably well, not saying a fucking word. You might point and grunt at a packet of biscuits you want them to pass to you, perhaps they send you a TikTok and you open it and say, out loud, “me” – but that’s it. Communication is for when you need to organise things. It’s cosy season, now. Time to sit back, do a face mask, and allow the limitations of circumstance to wash over you like a perfectly middling Netflix show about murder.

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It’s exhausting, hoping for things. And now we can stop. It’s cold, it’s dark, you’re sleepy – and, in a way, that’s comforting. As the cold air starts to whip around your neck, abandon the concept of summer and all that comes with it. Lean into “having a Horlicks” as an activity; into fireworks going off every week simply because there are more hours in the day where it is dark and there is nothing else to do; into not being able to find any of the work documents you need because your tabs are cluttered with recipe ideas revolving around mashed potato.

Coast into 2022 binge-watching a show that feels like a jumper. Consider adopting a cat. Give yourself over to quiet nights, to piles of wet leaves congealing on the bottom of your shoes, and to the one source of liberation that remains true and constant in this world: giving up!

@emmaggarland