Week 4 - Book of Me - Favourite Season(s)

This post is part of an ongoing project, the Book of Me, Written by You, started by Julie Goucher of the Angler's Rest blog supported by Thomas MacEntee of Geneabloggers.

This week's prompt for the Book of Me is 'Your Favourite Season(s)'.  There's not much difference between this week's post and the longer version in my private blog, I couldn't think of a lot to say that was personal or needed keeping private.  The prompt didn't really speak to me or evoke particular memories, just general vague feelings.

I must be a 'glass half empty' sort of person as I can think of lots of reasons for NOT liking particular seasons.  Winter is cold and I am usually ill.  When it snows the buses stop and you can't go anywhere. Winter has Christmas in it and that's NOT a good thing, just too complicated. 

Spring is better, but still cold and wet - and I've got the worry of planting stuff now in my new(ish) big garden.  Plus it's the busiest time for CAMRA meetings so we hardly have any free weekends.  I am allergic to grass pollen and that always seems bad early on in the year - although anti-histamines are good these days. 

Autumn is OK, but that's the new term for school, which wouldn't have been a favourite for many years.  There are new programmes on the TV in the autumn, but that feels like a relatively new thing and certainly not a good enough reason to like the season. I don't like fallen leaves (not in my garden anyway, though walking through them before they go mushy is nice), you just have to sweep them up, and tidying up the garden is damp and scratchy.  There's the work of picking and preparing, drying, freezing, and so on.  It's nice to have free food, but there's a lot of work in the autumn with it.  You have to put the heating on and worry about how much that is going to cost this year.  You worry about having enough jumpers and are your boots still waterproof?  And then you get back to Winter.

So my least not favourite is summer.  Shall we say from May to August?  I know that's four months, but I seem to come alive in May and by beginning of September I'm worn out and worried about the winter to come.

 

Hot days at school, escaping out of and back into (probably illegally) the back of our classroom (4th and 5th form) at break and lunchtime by the window onto the grass of the playing field, 'cos the door is a block and a corridor away (one of those schools with blocks 'hanging off' a longitudinal corridor that stretched for (what felt like) miles.  Lounging on the grass at home, 'playing out' for hours and hours because it didn't get dark until after 9pm.  Yes, long days, I like them. 

Not having to go to school was always a plus - summer holidays, the seaside.  Time with my parents and my brother without other people getting in the way.  We used to live on the edge of an estate, near fields and a large wooded area - Cannock Chase.  We (the local kids) spent hours in those fields and that wood, making camps, running about, playing the make believe games that are important when you are little.  I expect people don't let their children play unsupervised in those woods anymore *sad*.

Being able to go for long walks (when I still could), sitting in the pub beer gardens on a Sunday with the children (they weren't allowed IN pubs in those days) and my Sheffield real ale drinking friends.  Being warm.  Being able to hang the washing out, not having it draped all over the house damp all week, even though I used to have to watch it all the time as I lived in a really dire place in those days - I don't have to worry about that now, I live in a much nicer neck of the woods now.

My back garden

 

For the last twenty one years the summer has meant my pilgrimage to the Great British Beer Festival in London for two weeks, by myself initially, then with my children, with my beloved OH in recent years.  Meeting up with good friends, better friends maybe for only seeing them once or twice a year and now via Facebook.  This year was the last time for me, as it's a volunteer thing I can't risk committing to go and then letting people down by being ill.  But I had a nice send off this summer.  It's been a good twenty-one years down there every August.

 

In the summer the garden, my garden at least, just coasts.  You have to water and weed, but the rest is as it is and it's too late to change now.  Winter is the time for big moves and lots of digging.  I am a lazy gardener I'm afraid - I would like to just sit out and read a book in the sun and stare at the produce growing thinking about the free food to come.  I enjoy seeing the first strawberry, the multitude of pods on the bean wigwams, the leeks getting fat.  Butterflies and bees, the cat trying to find the best place to sunbathe and then getting too hot and looking for a cool patch of earth to roll in. 

Yes, I like the summer best.