Summer, as seen from under a bar-heater

It’s a terrible cliché that at this time of year, a lot of us (no matter how strong the global socio-political-economic headwinds may be, or how gut-wrenchingly weak the rand is) have to brace ourselves for the perpetual rolling maul of other people’s European holidays.

And even before our friends, neighbours, work colleagues and some dude you follow on Instagram for a reason you can’t remember, gleefully jump on Emirates flights for places where it’s summer, there’s the kind of creeping torture of watching every corner of the internet preparing the ground by relentlessly pushing out the kind of heavily filtered “Perfect Summer” that Ian McEwan uses in the novels he writes when he’s run out of money.

The problem is that the northern hemisphere summer turns every nook and cranny of itself into a tentpole event: a commodified experience designed to create the sense that if you’re not in it, you’re not really living – because clearly the point of life isn’t to go do your job so you can keep a roof over your head, but to lie in a meadow eating runny cheese.

There are music festivals (so many music festivals), literary festivals, podcasting festivals, cooking festivals, sporting events, sun-drenched Italian beaches, sun-drenched Spanish beaches, fuck … (with climate change) sun-drenched English beaches.

“Legacy” bands are falling over themselves to stage cash-grabbing reunion tours, non-legacy bands are fighting to the death to secure “the song of the summer”, people you’ve only vaguely heard of are hard-launching their relationships at “Glasto” or showing the world how definitely over their divorces they are by being topless … at “Glasto”, and everyone else is trying desperately to cram themselves into the bottom corner of a picture of someone doing one of the above to hoover up third-hand relevancy.

Every second, someone is declaring that it’s either “Tomato-Girl summer”, or “grilling summer”, or that some obscure Finnish drink made from lingonberries that have been shat out of a moose is “the drink of the summer”, or that some peasant situation is “the sundress of the summer” or that some broken pile of wood at the bottom of a dry well is, in fact, “the park bench of the summer”.

You’re perpetually wading through artful social media posts of plates of squid on a baking rooftop in Athens captioned: “THIS.” It’s pictures of sunburnt legs on a quote-unquote “beach” of sharp, pointy rocks, awkwardly clutching a paperback that someone in a windowless room was forced to name the “Must-Read Beach Book of the Year” on pain of losing their already underpaid job to ChatGPT.

It’s overwhelming and exhausting. And yet the rhythms of the international calendar force everyone not in the Global North to endure a 24/7 assault of all of this, all while we cling to our Safeway bar-heaters like anxious-attached baby koalas and bravely try to hold onto a semblance of a social life while rain, frost and damp actually try and kill us.

Meanwhile, back in South Africa …

And that weirdly lies at the heart of the South African “winter problem”. Our unique (and wonderful) geography means there’s little to no uniformity in what we would define as “winter”.

While Joburgers are being instantly freeze-dried the second they step into the shadow of a small bush, Capetonians are being consumed by damp and mould and having knife-fights in the parking lots of strip malls over the last bag of dry hardwood. Get on a Zoom call with your cousin in Umhlanga and they’ll totally troll you by blithely popping on-screen in a T-shirt and plakkies, while at the same time your mate in Bloem is trying to ladle biltong breakfast soup into his face through five balaclavas. There is no blanket cosiness to a South African winter.

We don’t have a Hygge to try and convince us that it’s actually a time of year that has some sort of merit. We can talk all we want about “soup season” but we are fooling exactly no-one.

Our badly designed houses, wardrobes, offices and lifestyles scream of a nation that has forever stuck its fingers in its ears, shouting “Lalalalalala I’m not listening” when anyone even dares acknowledge the existence of a time of year when it gets actually very damn cold.

Whereas for the North, “summer” is a short, fleeting, desperate and precious time – a product to be urgently exploited for profit.

Influencers of every shape and stripe bank as much content as they possibly can before they’re plunged back into the eternal mizzling grey that is otherwise known as “the rest of their actual life”. Every expat who moved to Denver and spends most of their life buried in a pile of urine-soaked sleet while simultaneously in fear of being deported to Venezuela will very suddenly be telling you round the clock how glorious the American Midwest is in order to make it seem like they don’t miss having a glass of merlot without having to sell their kidneys. A Parisian apartment the size of a family table at Spur suddenly looks a lot sexier the three weeks of the year when you can actually see the sun setting sensually over the third arrondissement, as opposed to the rest of the year when it feels like the inside of a drainpipe with a couch.

A perfect storm of iPhones, the rhythms of the calendar and the strange close-but-also-an-actual-world-away proximity of where we live to all of this forces us to watch this Aperol-tinged movie whether we want it or not.

Maybe that’s what really gets me. Not the envy, or the Fomo, or the winky “hotdogs or legs” posts, but the dawning realisation that summer itself – real, imagined, or aggressively curated – is just another thing we now consume through a screen, out of sync with what’s happening in our own streets and parks and outdoor spaces.

And no amount of soup season will save us from that.

_{Top image: Rawpixel/Currency collage.}