This summer, as it faces its impending, sullen end, is one I now consider in reflection. Ignoring my own confused complexion, I can say it has been an entirely disorienting experience. These serene sunny months, now in the past, have been polluted with a notable few perplexing highs and ordained with a great many expected lows. As with all summers, it was one that began with high hopes; proclamations fuelled by ambition, and joy, and rainbows, and unicorns all of which soon descended into misery and dread. In the beginning, my delusions created grand plans: to hike, to camp, to travel, to laugh, to learn, and most of all to live life to its utter all-consuming fullest. In return for my magnificent requests, the universe, in all its generosity, awarded me several slightly traumatising - admittedly memorable - nights of booze-fuelled fun, a copious, immeasurable, incalculable number of ‘mental health’ walks (and other such sanity saving activities) and a frankly mind-metamorphosing month in the eternally exquisite cage they call london. Allowing me to thus far say that this summer I have without a doubt lived life to its very dullest. Around me, hoping for even just a moment of reconciliation, I searched beyond the guise of my sullen state of life and was met with wild-fires spurred on by global warming, record poverty coupled with record profits for oil and gas companies and, to top it all off, several celebrity suicides. I have been often reminded in my life that it is all about perspective, but even an objective eye, in my undoubtedly unobjective opinion, could take into account every major event of this summer, in my life and in the world as a whole, and find a fraction that evidences how in proportion to all the good which has occurred, that I am in fact a truly miserable, helpless welp with nothing better to do than to complain on the internet like a sad old man with no one left to talk to. So, to allow both myself and you, the reader, to evade my anguish, I think the only thing left to do is visit my ghosts of summer past.

 

In a moment of uncharacteristic optimism, I will admit that my life has been one I would struggle to say has been short of exceptional summers. A childhood rooted (and, thanks to several years of misfortune following my early childhood, only rooted) in the middle class has the effect of doing this to a person. One of the most memorable of these joyous innocence-infused journeys being that in Australia. Begrudgingly, and with great effort required - thanks only to the entanglement of time (and certainly not booze-induced brain decay) -  the memories elect to return. The most pungent being those of an asertive all-consuming alertness to the possibility of crocodile, snake or spider attack (in the middle of Sydney) and more notably, of having what would’ve been a life squandered with record-breaking speed. Despite these undoubtedly rational fears, considering one's presence in a country ladened, head to toe, nostril to nail, with creepy little critters that want nothing more than to cease your existence, I, in all the (admittedly not far devolved) wisdom my infant self had, elected to choose another means of breaking those aforementioned records. It became a fateful one, the day my family decided to take us to the infamous - both globally and, following ‘the incident’, also amongst my family - Bondi beach. Unaware of the calamitous destiny that awaited to bestow itself upon us we trundled down with what can only be described as a hereditary signature gracelessness. After surviving a walk from our hotel to the beach beset with the unending assault that is Australia's bastard sun and attempts to ensure that when our flip-flops inevitably melted, we directed the phenomenon back onto our feet, before us lay our final fateful hurdle. To best understand the following chain of events I find it crucial to provide a brief moment of exposition. In my childhood, as I’m certain will surprise very few of you, I was what parents would kindly downplay as ‘a bit of a handful’. In reality, I was a chaos fuelled combination of achingly, insufferably energetic and entirely impossible to put to bed. So, when my parents experienced the miracle that was finding an object that had the correct magical imbuing to successfully lul their demon spawn into a sweet sleep, they would hold on to it… tight. Unfortunately for my now sun-damaged family, one of these mystical objects happened to be a book aptly, if not somewhat ironically, titled ‘I Believe I Can Fly’. A novel that sought to inspire within its influential consumers a sense of self-confidence and hope. Strangely, the writer of this damning book decided that the greatest means of instilling such commendable values within the masses was to tell the story of a young girl and her magic swing. Just the right amount of peculiar to raise a slight suspicion - as in my opinion, all children’s books do - that the writer had, in some inescapable boredom, and after a heavy handed glass of alcohol infused beverage, thrown a selection of random objects and words into a hat, picked 5 and combined them to make a coherent and morally sufficient story. Nevertheless, everyday without fail, the little girl hopped to her tree and swung in her swing, filled with joy and glee, until (unsurprisingly) she became sick of her undeniably mundane life and, as all little girls all one day do, decided she would defy all laws of matter and physics. One day, post hop, she sat in her swing and, with that self-same glee, proudly proclaimed ‘I Believe I Can Fly!’. Just as quickly as her writer began to cry at the realisation their life had surmounted to actually writing this, she ascended, through the clouds, past the heavens and into space. Learning life-long lessons about herself and the universe before safely and soundly returning to her swing. Without so much as a second thought she waddled back home, forever changed with not one question to be asked. So, there we were, the only thing laying between our rosy cheeks and the great blue expanse that sprawled out before us was a ramp, several metres tall, that took you down to the beach from the carpark - one, I should note for the purposes of this story, that was noticeably unfenced. It took less than an instant for my mind to make the connection… This was my moment… I was going to fly, I yarped out those sacred words and, quite unlike this matter bending little girl, my infant self in his pitiful, reality-anchored state, did not so much ascend as plummet, hard… and fast, faster than my dad could say ‘Oh for fuc…’ straight into my sandy, painful fate. Hours later, I awoke to further profanities, though now coming mostly from my mum and aimed almost entirely at my father, who was noticeably christened ‘Fucking Stupid Idiot’. In all fairness, it was a bit of a pisstake that he didn't leap into action and catch me mid air, and she was right, he should’ve foreseen I would take the word of a girl and her magic swing over all laws of gravity and the clear several metre drop that lay before me. Safe to say my grasp of reality is fairly solid these days.

 

Fortunately for you all, I survived - just as I have survived all my similarly anarchic summers - to tell the tale. Concussions aside and with many tears cried, the summers passed, slowly fading and contorting into one demonic amalgamation that I keep in the summer room of my memory palace. One I call upon when I forget the most vital lesson that I have learnt from all my dog-days. No matter what happens, it will always be funny at some point.