Think of all the people having sex outside during the summer nights — their bodies shimmering with excitement in the fear of being caught, their bottoms pressed against ruffled grass and the tiny movements of insects, all of the inside spaces that they’re trying to escape (the people, not the insects).
Think of these insects under human cheeks, the soon-to-be inheritors of the no-longer-human earth, their love of our blood as they sink their tiny mouths into our flesh and drink it.
Think how far the bugs travel without even having a conception of home or loss or belonging. They just make it up as they go along.
I say this because there was a time during all the lockdowns when it was rare to walk across Hackney Marshes at dusk and not see two people fucking. And everyone I spoke about it with was too enamoured by this bold gesture of freedom to perform disapprobation.
That’s the freedom of summer: being on the move, making a new home with your buttocks any time you press them anywhere, a time where you can rest where you damn please because the warmth is comfort.
My summer days are not so free. I spend them mostly in the kitchen, which in my flat is gloriously light due to a hatch in the roof. I’m working on my day job, my 9-5 normal guy job. It gives me all the satisfaction that stability brings after four years of toiling in the academic shitstorm. The blissful thing about having a normal guy job is that I can break up my normal guy work habits with the quotidian thrills of summer guys: I drink iced coffee, I eat Indian mangos, I work with my shirt off, nearly naked, and frantically throw it back on before a zoom call.
In the last week I have spent one evening within the confines of my home. Every other evening was the freedom of expanded leisure time: the park, the pub, the concert hall, the warehouse rave, the Colombian restaurant in the market. I might have been hallucinating but since the summer solstice it felt like the evenings have got even longer? Is that even right?
Summer time is when we make myths, or whatever. Or stories are our gay science. The cherry stone is sweltering against the swollen, chewed flesh you bit off of it.
And when I’m in my home at night the building is stodgy with rent, its structures defined by all the money it holds, like every other building in London — a kind of architecture of constipation, holding all our waste and shit inside it in the form of money. I wish it would retain the heat, too, for the cold winter ahead. But there is no rational alignment between money and nature, just an increasing severity that it feels barely possible to manage.
All year round our freedom is defined by this anal-retention of property: clubs close, rent drives the price of food and beer up, spaces hospitable to a lack of money disappear. Rent increases change everything. And in London in particular, where there is an excess of culture, there is also an absence of cultural common ground. We can eat as much culture as we want but it’s not ours to share or make in any meaningfully common way: and so the city feels increasingly like a museum. A city of art galleries and fashion brands, culture everywhere but none of it really yours.
But summer is not for thinking about these things. Summer nights are for acts of escape. Come join me among the bushes and in the woodlands under the last of the summer sun.
Come run down the hot streets of summer with me at midnight, clutching a cold bottle of something, wrap your lips around it and swig.
Kiss me down-wind of the barbecue grilling rosemary scented flesh. Let’s get our hands all sticky from a pot of summer berries and wipe our filthy hands all over the backs of our trousers.
Let’s enjoy the temporary plenty of what everyone brings to the park, we’ll have a higgledy-piggledy assortment of great and bad snacks and everyone will find gratitude in this imperfect spirit of togetherness.
To be truly alive is to live with a profound acceptance of experience as ambivalent, where finding good in a bad world is to choose to forget all the bad shit and know it’s still there regardless of what you do. To enjoy plenty is to select something specific and leave the world behind in wild abandon. And sometimes that’s exactly what you need to do to come back down to earth and face the fresh terror of reality. Summer nights we leave it all behind because one fine morning we are going to seize the day and break it open.