Times of London Editorial for those missing Sisu

What, no sun? I demand a Weatherson Inquiry
Janice Turner






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Published at 12:01AM, July 14 2012



After our long, filthy winters, we Brits are owed a few summery days. It’s our right. It’s our payback

The woman who sold me new running shoes was Finnish, so I couldn’t resist asking if the weather in her country was as miserable as here. “Well, yes,” she said. “But in Finland we are grateful for whatever summer we get.” They call it sisu, this prized national characteristic of guts and grit, a stoicism borne of harsh, dark interminable Arctic winters. I would make a terrible Finn.

Because I believe that in Britain we earn our summers. We deserve them. We endure nine months of fish-tank skies, that foul indigenous wet-cold that makes my reconstructed cruciate ligament throb, the sundown-before- teatime gloom that drives us inside, shrinking the world to one ill-heated room. We are owed summer. It’s our right, our payback, our fair-do’s.

For those like me who live for summer — and don’t tell me you hate it, you Goths and reptiles, you opaque-tight-wearing freaks and Celtic-skinned stay-indoors — the prospect of going right through to next winter without one is too wretched to contemplate.

A wobbly May is OK, a wet early June is a waste, but we’ll live. But once the solstice is reached, the days have started getting shorter again and still the sun hasn’t showed, with August (always a moody month) already written off: despair. Summer has been fragmented or tardy many times, but never simply cancelled.

All that pink wine undrunk, the summer clothes going back in winter storage unworn, the yellow print dress I bought knowing it will look best with a tan still with its label, the cushions for the outdoor furniture mouldering. Meanwhile, after the weather’s rain-sun-rain-sun tantrums, our gardens taunt us with their lush CGI super-fecundity. You can almost watch the runner bean shoots curl around the canes, the lawn needs mowing more often than George Michael needs a shave and yet there hasn’t been one single evening when it has been possible to sit out and revel in it.

I don’t believe we are entitled to much summer. Just a meagre portion. The American writer Bill Bryson writes of how grateful the English are for the most modest of treats: a scone, a muffin, or other baked goods little more lavish than bread studded with currants. Likewise, all we need is one carefree month when life is easy, when the bin men do their rounds shirtless, London decamps to its sun-baked pavements and you can dress to leave the house in less than a minute.

Ideally, of course, I’d prefer a heatwave where, bored with strappy tops and maddened by wasps, by the end you’ve had such a bellyful of summer that you’re grateful for autumn. But, at a push, I’d settle for a single lovely fortnight of warmth on my bare arms, or even one stifling weekend when the answer to the restless question “What shall we do today?” is “Nothing”.

Of course, you can always go abroad, except because of GCSEs, work and the Olympics I’m tethered to London until late August. But anyway I don’t want the torpor of a dusty, arid Mediterranean summer where you just lie listlessly by a shady pool. I long for a temperate, balmy, sweet-scented British July, where a game of tennis or a bike ride is possible even at noon.

Quite how much weather influences national character didn’t strike me until I visited Australia. On the evening news, I heard some cataclysmic report about Australian education. The details now escape me, but it was of the magnitude that half of all children were functionally illiterate. It was the kind of story that in Britain would start a cacophony of why-oh- whys, a festival of hand-wringing and national self-flagellation. But next morning I switched on the Sydney news again to hear no mention. The newspapers barely covered it. Australia had shrugged, written a Post-it note to itself and stepped out into the sun.

Our own tendency to over-think, to beat ourselves up and pee powerfully down upon every bright new endeavour before it is even realised is the consequence of a miserable climate. Sue Townsend once told me that her Adrian Mole books were most popular in Northern Europe; the Spanish and Italians didn’t get that repressed, febrile, cooped-up introspection. If you live in utter confidence that your wedding party, beach barbecue or natty new linen shirt will be greeted by friendly skies, that’s half of life’s disappointments avoided right away.

To quote an archetypal football cliché, in Britain it’s the hope that kills us. Our weather is like the worst kind of parent, one who excites us to put on our best frock for a trip to the zoo, then lets us down. No wonder we are a bitter, fractious, fighty people who snigger gleefully when it rains on other people’s parades. Listening to people talk about the Olympics, almost willing it to be a screw-up, you’d think that we long for security breaches more than gold medals.

But still the hope flickers. Maybe, just maybe, this year will be different. A sign for an outdoor cinema event next weekend gave me a pang of melancholy. Those trusting organisers, imagining rugs on grass, white wine chilling. Already the park’s water table is right up and the paths are rivulets. You know that this outdoor screening of Amélie will go the way of the asparagus crop, the Great Yorkshire Show, the daft Jubilee boats, Kylie reuniting with Jason — in fact every other bright, frivolous, bare-legged celebration of life. Rain, you utter bastard.

Worst of all there is no one to blame; no minister to haul on to Newsnight to explain why the front destined for Scandinavia has been stuck for weeks; no calls for a Weatherson Inquiry.

Although, of course, the scientists would say it’s all your fault. You with the patio heater, eating outside in late September. You, as well, too bone idle to wield a brush, blasting away with your leaf blower. You broke the Gulf Stream, you melted the Arctic sea ice.

Once we believed that this would mean baking hot Julys, where we’d plant vineyards and never need take a Gatwick charter flight to Faliraki again. But instead it means our summers will remain British, only more so. If there’s one way to make us finally take global warming seriously, this could be it.