Ode to Summer

Summer Fields

The midge hums languidly in the thick still air, the gossamer dance of the butterfly brushes a delicate vitality across the sun-warmed meadows, afar the azure sky envelopes the rolling hills which surround, and I, in my commune with nature, try desperately to ignore all of the above as I wrestle with the twin desires of wanting to stay asleep in my increasingly stifling tent, and the piercing need to relieve my body of the previous evening’s lager consumption.  The eternal struggle of the summer camper.

The summer holidays are upon us, which means it’s time to break open the tents, switch to a diet of food that can be cooked on a one-ring gas burner, and develop a tolerance for warm beer. It’s time for tents.

I love camping. Having been brought up on a council estate in Manchester, my earliest experiences with the countryside were climbing one of the three trees within a twenty minute walk of the flats we lived in, or watching Last of the Summer Wine.

 Even now, separated from those flats by twenty-three years,two-hundred miles and several years of tertiary education,  the life pastoral brings to mind images of old men in shopping trolleys and tweed acting irresponsibly against the verdant stone-walled backdrop of the Yorkshire Dales.  What japes!

I’ve tried to develop a more mature connection with the great outdoors.  When we moved from the flats, we moved next to Southern Cemetery in Manchester, famous for being a haunt of Morrissey and for being utterly massive.  I discovered that if I spent my Sunday mornings reading Thomas Hardy whilst listening to The Archers on my Walkman, and wandered far enough into the cemetery, I could easily be ensconced in a tranquil English country village, albeit with neighbours slightly more lifeless than the real thing.

 Coincidentally, it was around this time my five-year stint as a Goth started,

There is something magical about the British Countryside.  Like the fact that you may seem to be so utterly removed from civilisation that you might be a Hobbit, but if you look closely enough, you’re never more than half an hour from a pub.

Although it seems the nearest purveyors of Philip Morris’s finest tobacco products are never where locals say they are, and are always closed. Almost as if everything has been carefully set up to to piss me off. Beer needs fags, as surely as toast needs Marmite, and Lucifer needs The Murdochs.

But the hard truth about the country, for a city dweller such as myself, is that it’s mostly an excuse to drink with a vague sense that because you’re out in the country, where the air is fresh with cut grass, cow farts and industrial grade pestkiller, that you are somehow a sophisticated drinker.

 The life rural provides a perfect cover for the dedicated boozer who wishes to avert the sneers of the world.  It is a world where ‘I’m on holiday’ is a reasoned excuse for sitting a chair all day imbibing cans of Kronenburg and staring at grass.

Bizarrely, when you try to recreate this in this city, and sit on a park bench with a plastic bag full of beer and stare into space, people tend to stare at you, and not in look-there’s-a-film-star way, but in more of a look-there’s-a-traffic-accident way. And so, it’s a country life for me.

Until, of course, I start to miss the telly.