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Summer in the noughties

Aug 9th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Like the English themselves, the English summer has changed yet stayed the same

NOT long ago, on one of the less rainy afternoons of what has passed for summer in England this year, Bagehot found himself at a glamorous London garden party. There was Pimm's; there was a string quartet; there were elaborate hats. As he strolled on the well-kept lawns, eavesdropping on the upper-crust chatter, Bagehot reflected on the centrality of summer to England's idea of itself, despite the fact that, meteorologically speaking, there often isn't much of it—and on how the elusive season was changing, and what those changes meant.

Racing at Goodwood and Ascot; strawberries at Wimbledon; cricket at Lord's; the Henley regatta; the Chelsea flower show: such are the ancient fixtures of the English summer, and they embody some of the key features of the nation's character. The English, they suggest, enjoy riding and betting on animals, and occasionally killing them. Opera at Glyndebourne and the Royal Academy's summer exhibition notwithstanding, the English are not very intellectual. They like dressing up, boozing and the challenge of organising a picnic during a hail storm. And England, as George Orwell observed, is “the most class-ridden country under the sun”, or the umbrella: with their nuanced enclosures and exclusive marquees, most of the traditional summer events still offer lots of opportunities for the toffs to sequester themselves from the oiks, and for everyone to ogle the royal family.

But there are new summer fixtures too, as telling as the old ones. Reflecting the anxieties of globalisation, an annual furore now erupts over the efforts of a foreign potentate or billionaire to buy an English football club. Praise is heaped on pupils for their ever-improving exam results, followed by scorn on politicians for making the exams too easy. Huge numbers of people stand in the mud at the proliferating music festivals, many of them thirtysomethings housed in heated tepees—reflecting the decline of counterculture or the elongation of youth, depending on your point of view. And, perhaps because summertime attacks offer the chance of maximum disruption, there is terrorism. This year, there were the failed car-bombings in London and Glasgow; last year, it was the alleged plot to blow up planes over the Atlantic; in 2005, the multiple lethal explosions of July 7th.

Because of that the English, like others, have acquired a new summer diversion: the airport obstacle course. They traipse around the terminals with their toiletries in transparent bags, grumpily take off and put on allegedly weaponisable clothing, and argue over the stingy hand-baggage allowance. Their destinations, if they get to them, have changed too: the Mediterranean is still top, but affluence, the internet and one-upmanship have made exotic places such as Cambodia and India more popular and encouraged new, niche holidays devoted to cookery, yoga, adultery and so on. Notwithstanding their Euroscepticism, ever more English people—some of them refugees from the property-price spiral at home—are investing in pads abroad, increasingly in once-obscure countries such as Bulgaria and Slovenia that geopolitics and no-frills airlines have opened up. The no-frills planes themselves have becoming interesting laboratories of Englishness, where tribes that ordinarily never cross paths—the bargain-hunting haute bourgeoisie and sun-and-sangria proletarians—awkwardly rub up against each other.

... Yet the end-of-the-pier spirit has never gone away, even if many of the piers themselves have crumbled into the sea. The strawberries-and-Pimm's version of the English summer—like the safaris that no Africans take, or the Outback in which few Australians live—is so quintessential that it is really a bit of a fraud (at that glamorous party that Bagehot went to, not many people were actually English). The truly defining characteristics of the English in summer are the opportunism and improvisation they display when the sun shines, and these have been on show on this summer's few hot days. Like animals around a watering-hole, the English throng to murky ponds and grimy beaches, getting sunburned and wearing ridiculous shirts.