Blue Shirt

I got up this morning and the sky was grey again, the sun advertising its presence only as a vague diffuse gloom. I woke up this morning approximately five minutes into my shower (the boiler is working properly again, praise God from whom all mercies flow...) and had my first truly coherent thought about halfway through my morning shave. Newly clean and conscious, I began hunting through the chest of drawers for a shirt.

My chest of drawers is something of a mess. The back half serves as an additional bookshelf, supporting thick tomes on materials science, mathematics for engineers, the fundamentals of creative design and an eight inch stack of ancient penguin paperbacks covering both he adventures of Ged the wizard in Earthsea and Gerald Durrell the naturalist in Corfu and Guinea. The front half is a mass of coins, toiletries, a graphics card I haven't got around to returning to storage yet and a blue lava lamp. There's probably a couple of allen keys or something on there as well. The drawers are only slightly better: the top one is a confusion of ties, socks and handkerchiefs while the bottom three were originally strictly segregated into t-shirts, trousers and jumpers, but now appear to be a confusing melange of all three, plus shirts, cummerbunds, scarves... In the second drawer, I found today's t-shirt. I also found something else.

Linen and cotton. Blue stripes. Sixteen inch collar (not that it matters because you never do up the top button). Short sleeves. One pocket. Dark smear on one end of the collar where the iron melted a piece of fluff onto it that time. Lightweight. My favourite summer shirt.

Soon, the clouds are going to blow away (or at least pile themselves into stately mountains, sailing through the air like dowager duchesses through a wedding reception). The sun is going to bake the ground dry and turn the fresh greens of spring (still, alas, held tightly in taproots and trunks in the trees on Hearsall Common) into the dusty, darker summer colours of mature leaves. People will wear sunglasses. Women will wear skirts and walk around without twelve yards of knitted sheep hair wrapped around themselves. Men will expose their legs with varying degrees of confidence, subjecting the nation to millions of knees previously cosseted away under denim and serge. People will drink lighter ales and iced cider rather than mahogany bitters and heavy red wines. Sessions will move from the back rooms of pubs to the beer gardens (or at least the windows will open to try and cool the sweating fiddlers and mandolin players down). Deck shoes and flip flops not boots and wellies. Bikes not buses. Deckchairs not armchairs. Sunlight not sodium light. Excessive amounts of vitamin D (within reason, obviously - nobody's got time for kidney failure when they could be at the beach).

In short, my friends, it will be summer.

Maybe I'm looking at this through blue tinted glasses, but I've got a good feeling about summer. It's a certainty in an uncertain world - rain aside, it's very difficult to prevent 5.972e24 kg from its allotted course around a local star.

The shirt goes back in the drawer, but that's okay. For now I'm looking for a clean hoodie, but in a couple of months time I'll be in a summer shirt.