In August, 1935, W.H. Auden, the centenary of whose birth falls this year, wrote, ‘August for the people and their favourite islands’. It is not the Isle of Wight or Brownsea or Lundy that Auden is referring to but islands off the German Coastline.
My father always insisted that it was pointless to buy a newspaper on Mondays because nothing ever happened on weekends. It took me a long time to realise that for him this was true because the stock markets were closed.
Likewise it is accounted a truism that August is the journalist’s ‘silly season’. Everyone is on holiday; nothing newsworthy occurs. This is difficult to square with the Augusts of 1914 and 1939, but perhaps even those years seemed less momentous at the time. For example, the full entry for Franz Kafka’s diary on 2nd August, 1914, reads, ‘Germany has declared war on Russia - swimming in the afternoon’.
Not much swimming possible this year - not even the Russian roulette variety available at Tidemills. The brief spell of hottish weather recently only seems to confirm Byron’s lines in ‘Don Juan’, ‘The English winter, ending in July, To recommence in August, now was done’.
Or the McLachlan cartoon depicting an elderly couple in a country lane. The man, holding out his hand, observes, ‘It must be August, the rain is getting warmer’.
With the best intentions, I know I will not manage the open-top bus jaunts up to Devil’s Dyke, or the bohemian beach hut bashes at Cooden. Like Louis MacNeice, another centenarian, in the poem entitled ‘August’, I shall lament ‘...how now, as every year before, once again the gay months have eluded me’