I am enjoying this sodden summer. I do know this much rain is bad: July was the UK’s sixth wettest on record and the wettest ever for Northern Ireland. It is worse than bad in China; it is catastrophic, with 20 killed in the worst rainfall in 140 years, since records began. And in the UK, there is harvest havoc to worry farmers, plus a very real danger that the insular and idiotic will point to a persistently, dramatically wet summer that is probably linked to the climate crisis as the opposite: a sign that everything is fine, really, so let’s celebrate with more North Sea drilling.
I am sorry, too, for anyone who needs a summer fix of vitamin D, light and warmth to maintain their health and equanimity. I am on record as being fairly anti-summer, and that remains true, but I am not implacably opposed to a bit of balmy weather. I don’t want to go all “some of my best friends are balls of incandescent gas” on you, but I am attempting to grow some tomatoes this year and I have a hammock. I wouldn’t say no to some sun now and then.
For all that, I can’t deny it: my water butt runneth over (literally). To me, grey, wet, leaden summer days feel retro, like a Swizzels Double Dip sherbet or a packet of Smiths Salt ’n’ Shake with the blue sachet of salt, both snacks I definitely ate in a damp cagoule as rain lashed down on (and probably into) my dad’s car.
A washout summer is a portal to so many childhood memories: I can’t remember a single holiday that wasn’t dominated by pewter skies and poor visibility, and every time I come in and have to wipe my glasses, change my socks and put on a jumper, I conjure them up. I remember the sensation of an overlong wet fringe being whipped, stinging with salt, into my face and mouth, on Filey beach in a gale. Whole weeks of that fine, all-enveloping, immersive rain, leavened only by the prospect of persuading a wet donkey to be stroked, somewhere down a muddy lane. The classic sight of, well, nothing at all out of a draughty Yorkshire Dales cottage window, as a determined front of horizontal rain settles over the valley.
Partly what I liked, as a constitutionally idle child, was the rain-stopping-play aspect. I remember the jubilation when a planned trudge up a vertical bog was replaced by an afternoon in the pub, a cake in a doily-filled and horse-brass-heavy tearoom with fogged-up windows, or a trip to the Derwent Pencil Museum in Keswick. I remember the low-key glee of eating sweets and reading comics in bed, the spectacular scenery of various beauty spots lost in the gloom, unmourned by me, outside. On one epic school natural history field trip, the campsite got so flooded we had to spend a whole day in a Northumberland chip shop rather than fossil-hunting: truly a result for a gang of 15-year-olds. That sense of being absolved from doing stuff by the weather feels like welcome respite if you’re not the summer fun type.
This weather feels like respite, too; it’s basically the UK getting off relatively lightly for once. I’m really enjoying seeing green, rather than crispy yellow and brown, out of the window and, when there is a break in the clouds, I happily watch blackbirds hunting for worms in the soft earth. But it’s a very 2023 type of enjoyment, tinged with all the normal 2023 stuff: guilt, unease and a sense of catastrophe only deferred. We are warned of a possible 30% increase in “uncomfortably hot” days in the UK soon.
Some idle Googling reveals that, astonishingly, Swizzels Double Dip and Salt ’n’ Shake crisps still exist in some form, probably propped up by adult nostalgia. It is nice to pretend, briefly, that the cool and relatively carefree summers of my childhood do, too.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
