Diss Express columnist Will Porteous shares his thoughts on the emergence of summer

There are times in my life that I assume different personas to get through hard moments or stays of difficulty.

More recently, I’ve been hungover a great deal more than usual. I still don’t know why, although it might have something to do with the sun. (Blaming an enormous ball of boiling hot gas for my drinking is a bit wonky, I know, but it makes perfect sense.)

You see, it’s been a never-ending dog of a winter. I said to myself about a week ago that if there’s one more day of a fresh easterly breeze anywhere near me then I’m joining The E-Street Band to tour the world. Bruce and I are tight. (Not so tight that’d he’d share a 99 flake with me, but still we go back.)

So, when the sun did finally come out, I marched like Johnny Mills to the nearest pub and ordered a stinkingly cold lager. I looked unto the heavens and said “This is your fault.” I was making up for lost time ... and I know I’m not the only one, hey Boris Johnson?

How long will it be until we feel like the summer has finally caught up with itself? It should be ashamed, frankly. Who does it think it is? Saturn? Jupiter?

Or is it the arrogance of the whimsical high pressure that refuses to drag itself and its Cartier watch up to see us until mid-June?

I wish there had been a referendum on high pressure and low pressure. I’d have been like your typical, misinformed, bitterly angry Brexit voter and voted to keep the low pressure because at least I’m used to the misery of a wet, grey British winter.

Who wants the promise of high pressure when we all know it won’t come and, when it does, it’s for a few days? When it does arrive, it does so like a child-like tantrum followed by thunderstorms and illegally immigrating hailstones.

So, if Sunak promises the great British public a referendum on getting out of these ridiculous ‘will the summer come or won’t it’ escapades, I’ll be voting to leave the British summers.

Last summer, the gardens of England turned brown, didn’t they? They went into hibernation mode and survived. Once again, how utterly shameful and cowardly.

That’s what I hate about British grass. It came over here (presumably on a high pressure front from Spain) and seeded itself on our rolling hills and fields, but, as soon as it became slightly hot, it ran away; it gave up.

It reminds me of hedgehogs and other species that are lovely to look at but, as soon as it gets a bit too hot or cold, they toddle off to a safer place, while we, the great British masses, freeze or melt in the cold or heat.

If you ask me, which you haven’t, but if you could I tell you now I would vote to leave the hedgehogs and cowardly grass for a land like Thailand, where the grass is better prepared and so is the wildlife.

You don’t get greenback ridge snakes hibernating in Phuket do you? The grass doesn’t take one look at the blue sky and say “No thanks, not today.”

The roads have been confusing me a lot recently as well, especially around Wortham Ling. The small country roads have started looking more like a Dacar rally track.

It’s not enough that the roads can’t handle anything over 20ºC. It’s that they start to fall apart under the slight test. Some potholes are so large I put my entire family in one the other day, including the dogs and the TV remote.

The potholes have been there so long it’s shameful. There’s that word again. They should be ashamed, though. You would have thought that, by now, they’d have evolved to fill themselves in again, wouldn’t you? Then there’s the melting roads.

What is going on? You don’t see the roads in Germany melting when it gets over 15ºC do you?

I had a perfectly good pair of Ugg boots ruined the other day. I was coming back from having the sixth layer of wax put on my Audi (I can’t remember which Audi to fabricate so I’m just saying Audi because most people that annoy me drive Audis and I got out to touch the newly waxed bonnet area and I stepped on to a melting patch of road.

I called the council and they said they would report the patch of melted road to the highway agency but it’s not the point, is it? There should be some sort of punishment, shouldn’t there? For the road I mean.

Perhaps if they threatened more roads with closures then they wouldn’t make so many potholes and get all melty when it gets hot.

The other day was so warm we decided to drive to West Acre in north Norfolk to its annual village fete. It was delightful.

The only small snag was the never-ending cycle of tantrums and insane, almost psychopathic, behaviour from our children.

I’m not saying there should be a police force that deals entirely with arresting kids for needless tantrums ... but there should be. I would ‘shop’ my kids quicker than a Norfolk minute. Any parent knows exactly what I’m talking about.

I couldn’t even enjoy any of the six pints I had to relentlessly drink.

I’m exhausted and broken in ways I don’t care to admit. I just want something to rely on again, don’t you?