An English Midsummer Evening

I was on my way to dinner last night and took a tour through Hyde Park. It’s the week of the longest days here, and it brought so much back to me. You remember the constant rain, the dark winter days, the sun going down around 4 pm, the horrifying imprisonment of Christmas, the condensation-drenched windows inside the the cigarette-smoke-filled bus I would take each day home from school.

You forget the glorious summers, when I would be woken up at 5 am by a dawn chorus of birdsong more deafening than any alarm clock, and the early sun would flood the bedroom I shared with my brother and sister. My mum simply threw us out of the house each day and asked merely that we return by sunset. And sunset could be 10.30 pm.

I could stay out late in the woods, reading or writing (yes, I was a nerd), or playing with my small band of friends in our various camps, or play impromptu tennis with my brother on the street outside our house, pretending we were the willowy British underdogs at Wimbledon, until the light faded and made it impossible. We were rarely interrupted, since our road was a dead end, and we were almost the last house on the block, which ended in fields and woods. Maybe it was because of the dreary dark winters that these summer nights held such charm; maybe it’s because the HIV ban kept me distant from my home country for so long that these late summer nights have had such a Proustian impact on me – but you can see where Shakespeare’s dream came from.

And as I looked at the wild grasses, and daisies, and chestnut trees and hazy, setting sun in the park, it was hard to believe I was in central London. But Hyde Park is big enough to lose yourself in and see nothing of the city anywhere. No office towers, no New York pressure. Just fields of grass. I could have been in Wiltshire or Sussex, where I grew up.

You think you change and adapt, but it’s uncanny how this flash of old summers came back instantly to me, how deeply I missed it, and how wonderful this little sceptered island can be at this time of year.