This will be one of those posts.
If I was to put the right key words into my blog search feature, I’m pretty sure I would find I’ve written it before, maybe even more than once. I’m not going to do that, though. I’ll just write it again. Perhaps I’ll say it better this time around.
Summer Equinox. The longest day. The shortest night. We’ve
done it all now. Tonight, 23rd June, is bonfire night in our neck of
the woods. It’s Saint John’s Eve. Its timing is a small notch off the mark for
exact Midsummer but it’s near enough and that’s certainly a large part of why
it exists and persists. It’s the final marker whereon you can stand and say you’re
right in the middle of the Summer. After that, it’s downhill all the way. Or
uphill, depending on how you care to look at it.
That’s what I want to type about today (and not for very
long, I feel). My feeling about the passing of Midsummer and indeed the passing
of the halfway point of anything at all. It makes me a bit sad. Not overwhelmingly,
all-embracingly flattened or anything as dramatic as all that. More just a dull
feeling that the best is now over and the remainder is just a swift run down into
something less good.
That’s how I kind of feel now. Now that the Summer Equinox
has been and gone. The best part of Summer is now over, as far as I am concerned.
It’s a feeling I try to quell and, to be fair, I largely succeed.
There are still some days in June left to enjoy, I tell myself, and July and
August will be pure Summer times, even though August is Autumn, really. There will
be lots left to savour and enjoy. Why, Summer is really only beginning. I tell
myself all this, and I largely believe in it, but through it all, there is a
little voice in the back of my head wheedling and complaining. “You know
that’s simply not true,” the voice says, “it’s more than half over now
and so the best is gone and what’s left is only second rate at best.”
I wish I didn’t have that voice in my head but it’s always
been there, ever since I was a little boy. I subconsciously calculate the
mid-point of any span of time and then I judge the first half as being the best
of times and the second half as being, effectively, an over-extended and
inferior end part. I do this with everything. Holidays, Christmas, bank
holidays, seasons, TV series, books, you name it. Whatever it is, it’s half-over
now and the best is certainly not still to come.
I’m doing it right now. It’s the weekend, a lovely time, by
all accounts. But Friday evenings are always the best, because they’re furthest
from the end. Saturdays are fine and Sundays are just a slow counting-down into
Monday morning, when the week will kick off again.
More worryingly, I quietly do this with life too. Not in a
big dramatic awful way, as I said above, rather just that quiet little illogical
voice in the back of my head (61 next week, it ain’t really going to get
much better from here on out, is it?). Even as I typed the word ‘illogical’
in that last sentence-but-one, the little voice is going, “What’s ‘illogical’ about
it? It’s only common sense.”
As I said, it’s a feeling I don’t just simply accept. I rail against
it. I battle it constantly. It’s now 10.40am, Sunday morning. I have a lovely
long Summer Sunday ahead of me, to enjoy and to savour, and that’s what I’m
going to do. The book I’m reading will be even better in the second half, you’ll
see. This second triangle of sandwich will be even tastier than the first.
But that little voice stays and stays and we all know why it
does.
Because there’s some small measure of truth to it. That’s
why. The Summer Solstice is now over and the next stop is darkness.
Not it isn’t. It’s just not.
Ah, but yes, it is.
2 comments:
Here's hoping for a long summer and a drawn-out autumn. Winter is a way off yet :)
Maybe it’s just me, me being me, but I’ve always been a big fan of the law of diminishing returns. Fan’s probably not the right word—it pisses me off no end—but I’ve come to expect it. That said, I’m not a huge fan of firsts either because we usually mess them up by being too careful, thinking too much beforehand, or just from nerves and lack of experience. Firsts also suffer from never living up to our expectations. So why should seconds or thirds or two hundred and twenty-seconds be any better? I actually wrote a poem about that a few days ago entitled ‘Onceness’—been writing a lot of “nessy” poems of late—in which I consider the fact that we do everything once and once only: our firsts are our first firsts and our seconds are our first seconds and so on. And yet, despite the distinct- and distinctiveness of everything we do trying to remember any one of those unique things with any degree of accuracy is neigh on impossible.
I can’t say I’ve been overly impressed with summer this year to be honest. It’s not disappointed me because I hate being too hot but suddenly it’s August and I’m thinking: Was that it? What that Summer? What happened to global warming? Why isn’t the tarmac melting like when we were kids? Even the gulls have been queer this year and it’s nearly time for them to head off to their winter retreats.
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