Well, we did it. Winter is finally dead. And, unlike when a real person dies, we don’t have to pretend there was anything good about it.
Goodbye, winter, a friendless season for losers. I mean this in the rudest possible terms, but particularly this year. Winter is a season for losers and a season for loss. It forces us to become worse versions of ourselves, taking us away from our friends and offering us nothing in return except the opportunity to complete our evening walks on hard mode. Meanwhile, everyone interesting immediately flees for summer in other parts of the world, which draws me into a blood feud with them.
But those battles can be delayed, because it’s September and that means it’s warm now.
The summer is dangerous for its own reasons but even they are preferable. Last year, for example, as soon as the days got longer, my body blasted out enough serotonin to force me to express-order a professional DJ deck I’ve never used and a pair of the smallest shorts you can own without a permit.
This year, after the winter we’ve had, it will blow my head clean off my body. We’re talking full cranial evacuation. Pez mode.
We survived the most wretched season in years. We survived the cries of the winter partisans, imploring us to embrace its dismal little fancies: the cosy fires, the big jumpers, the endless steaming bowls of soup.
Listen to yourself. Do you have any shame? Nobody within a non-annoying income bracket has access to a fireplace, and Australian homes are notoriously so draughty that you can’t burp in your living room without someone telling you off about it on the street outside. Meanwhile, soup is a food most popular among a generation whose best years are so far in the past that their best years probably have a racist nickname. There’s a reason for that.
If this is you: stop it. What you are doing is British. It’s an extremely British impulse to embrace the things that make life harder, and this is doubly so when it comes to winter.
I would probably learn to love winter too if I lived in the UK. There, every day is winter. The summer means heading to one of those kitty-litter beaches and hoping that somebody will come by selling mugs of an indiscernible hot meat drink before your thumb-faced children expire because they missed their morning beef. When you return home you find the government has declared martial law because the royal family’s cryochambers were never designed to battle temperatures above mild.
We are blessed that this veil only falls over us once a year. But there was a particular cruelty to this winter. After two bad years of winter lockdowns we’d forgotten what it meant to have the wind cut through us while waiting in line for a bus, or trying to find the motivation to attend a party on a rainy night, like an alchemist struggling to create gold out of seasonal affective disorder.
We needed to be handled tenderly, and the tyrant winter said: eat my ass.
But now we look to a new era, free of losers. Don’t fret about rumours that La Niña is threatening another sequel to the two lamest summers on record (nothing wrong with a shorter bushfire season), or that the northern hemisphere’s game of choose-your-own-apocalypse isn’t inspiring the greatest vibe (not my hemisphere, not my problem), or that news out of the US is that there’s no official drink of the summer (allow me to introduce you to a little thing I invented called “the shandy”).
This is what winter trains us for – to take whatever small moments of grace we can and hold on to them, swallow them if we have to, keep them inside our bellies like a stone.
The modern world is an increasingly bonkers place to try to make a life in, and you’ve probably realised by now that things aren’t going to get less bonkers any time soon. So I’m not going to spend another moment thinking about the lamest season on Earth. I don’t care what those communists at the Bureau of Meteorology say the temperature is – from now on it’s summer.
The days will be long and our fans will struggle to make a dent. At night the cicadas will continue their eternal tantrum. Everything will be beautiful once more.
Do you hear it? That’s the sound of the summer. And if you listen carefully, one night you may hear a siren – an ambulance taking me to hospital for emergency shorts surgery.
Jack Vening is a writer from Canberra. He is currently completing his first book of stories, and sends out Small Town Grievances, a community newsletter about a nameless town with an owl problem, every few months
