August.

Hello

First of all a massive thank you for all your nice messages and comments on my first post here on Substack. I was really longing it out getting here and I’m very glad I finally did. It feels nice here, like the glory days of Twitter (RIP) with an actual sense of community. And although I am navigating it with a level of apprehension only shared with my mother using Instagram, I am enjoying my time here.

I’ve been trying to figure out how best to use it, is it a weekly newsletter or is it a weekly essay of some sort. And I don’t know yet. I guess we’ll figure that out as we go. For now though some thoughts on August.  My birthday month and a month I can’t believe we have already reached. I’m genuinely still complaining to people that I have Christmas weight to lose. Babe, forget it.

August I’ve always felt has a lot going for it. Not because of all the gifts and imminent attention I will receive come the 14th, I mean as a brand: visually, sonically, tonally…i’ve always felt August has something about it that says, “I’m that bitch”.

I always loved how it looked, a big fat A, two U’s propped up by a G, how it feels to say out loud, how it’s the home of all the most brilliant, most annoying, most Leo-like Leo’s like Madonna and Andy Warhol.

Reaching this month always makes the year for me feel somewhat ripened, the fullness of summer reaching its sweltering peak. A time of abundance, an onslaught of Aegean blue seas flood your instagram feed as your friends start to look slightly pickled from rosé. A time when the acronym AFA is thrown around by the rich ones in your gang, those in fashion or those, just simply: Italian. Ahhhh to be Away For August.

But with all that delicious ripeness comes an unsettling feeling. A brewing sense that the end is nigh. A time when I start to look the end of the year in the eye. Was that it? I worry it is as I have Zoom calls about an unfamiliar, futuristic place called “2027”. Am I really ready to let go of my flip flops?

I just broke them in.

I’m writing to you from my kitchen which due to its glass roof doubles up as a human oven for the summer months. Summer this year has been an endurance test. My plants and my hair have taken a battering and now both resemble dust in a similar shade of meh.

The mornings I can do. Starting the day by seeing that little glimmer of sunlight shape a neat lightbox around my curtains is special. Elemental beauty. Like Es Devlin is waking us up. And there’s nothing like the orange morning light over an empty London on my way in to work as an Addison Lee ignores Islington’s speed bumps, invigorating my spinal fluid. The open window, cool breeze and my wet hair a winning highlight of each day.

August this year will mark two years of contractual early morning starts.  If you don’t know or maybe you hate good music, I’m back on the radio in the mornings again, over at BBC Radio 6music. Bringing you a daily show at a time I swore i’d never work at again. But the allure of Sharon Van Etten every 2 minutes and access to a Christmas do where Steve Lamacq might perform karaoke was too much of a pull. As early risers, me, the team and the listeners are trauma bonded through both the beauty or the brutality of our seasonal early morning experiences. The other morning a man called Johnny text in saying he can’t wait for winter now, it’s too hot and he’s had enough. This split the team. Myself, Ella & Zoe agreed, we can’t hack these endless hot long days and sticky nights any more. Producer Mark was furious. He is very pro-summer and hates us eyeing up October on the old iCal with glee. As a proud Augustian (not a word) I should have been furious too. My Leo heart furiously supportive of this excellent month. But I couldn’t agree more. Wrap it up lads, we’re too hot.

Sure, sure the sun rising at 4am or whatever is adorable and provides a more scenic journey in to work but by the time I get out post-show it’s hell. London is vile when it’s hot. Gruelling. The tube in summer is surely illegal.  I’ve not fact checked this but pretty sure it’s factual accurate: my house is the hottest place on earth. I don’t think I was this hot in Namibia. The dogs hate it. They’re restless and irritated, dramatically collapsing to the floor and lolling around on their sides like dead donkeys. I try and hand feed them ice cubes but they turn their noses up in disgust, refusing to help themselves survive. Some days a semi frozen cucumber does the trick and we sit there, me in my pants, Pig and Stinky naked (they are dogs) chewing down on cucumber thinking “maybe I was harsh on LA, at least it had air con”.

Does summer always feel like this? It feels like there’s a brutality to the heat this year. The sun has got its hat on but it’s an angry hat that wants everyone to die.  Or do we say that every year? I worry we do and then the bleakness of winter erases it from our mind.

I never thought I’d resent the sun but here we are, our happiness now reliant on a budget air-con unit from Amazon that has all the subtlety of an old, chugging, army helicopter. We all gather round it like oldies in the 30’s with the ol’ wireless. Working, eating, bathing, sleeping and watching telly in this one icy room like a gay, furry take on Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. I can’t take it anymore, mouthing F**K YOU to the weather lady on TV every time she shows me a 32 or above.

Historically, like any normal person I’ve loved the summer and loathed those short, dark winter days, slagging off January to high heaven. So much so that she inflicts the worst seasonal depression on me as a fuck you back. But this year the months seem to have switched roles for me and I think it’s down to my other half. Meshach has shaped me in many ways over the time we’ve been together but his most powerful lesson has been witnessing his ability to just deal with it, whatever it is.  A bad hangover, a twisted sock in your shoe, an excruciating long day after no sleep, an injury, uncomfortable conversations, but most bravely: January. I told him of my disdain of it many years ago and he said “Well, there’s one every year, so get over it.”

Over our years together I’ve made a concerted effort to tame the banshee of January and “get over it”.  This year I used it as a time for new explorations, for new lessons or passions like pottery (binned it off), pilates (binned it off), Spanish (binned it off) or meditating (don’t ask).  I rode it out, actively enjoying each day, indulging in my self inflicted hibernation and spent the following weeks and months noticing the minutiae of the changing days. I studied the moon cycles and noticed the bulbs of my magnolia trees pop as I dreamt of being out here in the garden, shoe-less and warm come August.  I daydreamed my way through February and March, longing and planning for a summer where I’d be both stick thin and muscular, hosting pizza parties in our lush Amazonian garden as people couldn’t believe I ate pizza and looked THAT good.

Unfortunately it’s not happened. I didn’t get the pizza oven working once and my tree got so fried and sad that I had to hire a medicinal tree specialist to inject it with electrolytes. “Whilst you’re here mate….” *offers up veins*

What I’ve lost in living trees I’ve gained in flies, every fly in Hackney is here doing a daily dance party before getting themselves stuck in my kitchen where they head bang themselves to death. They too presumably just over it. Unlike the flies before their demise, these prolonged sunny days mean I do not have the energy to attend a mating ritual with others, I’m bleeding knackered! Lazy! Exhausted!  And I mean exhausted - when you get from school exhausted. Desperate for a Muller Corner and a Sunny Delight to revive my aching carcass. I’m more tired now than I was in January, maybe a symptom of summer life spent on the Central Line.

So much like I longed for this summer, I now find myself praying for colder days…

Bring me breeze my Lord,

bring me crispness in the air,

bring me lovely autumnal menswear cos dressing as a man is shit in the summer.

bring me lovely autumn layers.

Take from me the heat,

take from me the sweat,

please remove the ritualistic curtain choreography of opening at dusk and closing at dawn, it’s like I work here.

And bring me winter.

Amen.