The key to happiness is surely to have a faulty memory, so that all the failures, the sadnesses, the betrayals and the totally crazy bits fade to black and only the good ones, vivid and burnished by time in a kind of frontal lobe Photoshop, remain.
Take summer. It really was better in your youth wasn’t it?
Just the thought of how it was then brings back a rush like prickly heat, you can almost smell the ozone from the sea, the rotting seaweed overlaid by the scent of suntan oil, the aroma of frying chips and onions, and in your ears the crack on a smacked child followed by the plaintiff wails.
I was, of course, too poor to get out of the city. The nearest I got to Doon the Watter was to tag in behind a portly woman, affecting to be her child, for a trip on the sludge boat, which left from Shieldhall to dump the city’s untreated sewage off Arran, so that it washed up, hopefully, on the richer folk bathing at Brodick and Lamlash. You got your lunch then for free too, before the rules-crazed EU decided, probably on the same day they decreed straight bananas, that this was environmental anathema. On a good day I can conjure up the smell of the thousands of tons of excrement as it went overboard and the cawing of the seagull looking for discards.
On other days my mother, bless her, would knot a handkerchief and tie it round my head to ward off the constant sun and send me out with a couple of eggs in my pockets which, at the height of the day, I’d fry on a baking metal tram track, the Number 9 to Auchenshuggle I recall, although I had to time it carefully or I’d end up with scrambled rather than fried.
I don’t remember the summer of 1959 where the temperature remained over 21C (although they did it in Fahrenheit back then ... which is 70) for three months. But I do remember the blazing heat of the record summer of 1976. I was in London then, where it was over 32.2C (90F) for 15 consecutive days. And it didn’t rain for a month or more.
Hyde Park looked like the Kalahari and Lord’s cricket ground was burned brown, a tragedy which, of course, spurred the government into urgent action. A Minister of Drought, Denis Howell, was appointed by Prime Minister Jim Callaghan and he was ordered to do a raindance. Howell took his job so seriously that he invited reporters to his home to set an example to the country on how he was saving water by bathing with his wife. Her name was Brenda, I believe. Dear reader, I averted my eyes.
But the appointment was a deft stroke because within days, possibly as a result of the raindance, the heavens opened and there were flash floods everywhere. Not missing a beat, Callaghan appointed Howell the Minister of Floods. Even now, I’m told, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell are practising their steps together for one they hope will banish Boris, although they’ve ruled out sharing the water.
A year later, in 1977, Paisley set the record for the hottest place in the country – no, not in housebreaking or chibbery – for a temperature of 30C (86F), which today might have you reaching for your fleece, or in Paisley (or for the sake of fairness some other randomly chosen town) a stab-proof gilet.
The highest temperature recorded was 38.5C (101.3F) in Faversham in 2003, where Bob Geldof had a home, and that summer probably reminded him of all the weans in Africa he had saved and encouraged him to do it all again.
That’s the evidence then and, as they say in these courtroom dramas and Hollywood disaster epics starring Tom Cruise or Nicholas Cage and CGI, it’s incontrovertible. The summers were longer and better back then. Just choose your own “then”.
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