SUMMER. I can take or leave it myself. The heat, the torrential rain, cricket on the radio (reminding me what it must feel like the rest of the year if you’re a non-football fan), getting sand in your sandwiches, forgetting to put sunscreen on, sunburn, insect bites, the significant birthday I have looming (I can’t be that old, can I?), that constant sense I’m not making the most of the season.

That’s the big thing, actually. The notion that there is a world at its hopefully most benign just ready to be taken advantage of and I’m not managing to do so. Because I’m still spending too many nights in watching repeats of Gogglebox on E4.

Every January I start conjuring up hazy plans as to how the coming summer is going to be different, how this time things are going to change.

Come mid-July I’m still stuck on the sofa thinking maybe I should have changed my T-shirt three days ago and still haven’t got past page three of War and Peace. (And, let’s face it, if I can't read it during these long summer evenings it’s never going to get read, is it?) Maybe this is the problem.

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Summer comes with a weight of expectation in the UK. This is the time of year when we can actually get out and do stuff. But part of me isn’t really that bothered about going out and doing stuff. And certainly not when the temperature is nudging the high 20s.

Obviously this is my fault, not summer’s. I just don’t think I’m necessarily built for this time of year. Spring, I love. Those first green shoots of the year, the sense of potential in what’s ahead, the possibility of playing Weightlifting by The Trashcan Sinatras – surely the best spring anthem there is – on repeat.

But come June all that good feeling begins to leak away just in time for me to rack up another year on the planet in July.

Is that the issue? Summer just reminds me that I’m getting older by the number of candles on the cake. NB, it’s a metaphorical cake. There isn’t a cake big enough to hold all the candles required now.

There are things I like about summer, I suppose. Going to the movies, galleries and bookshops mostly. But that may be because of air conditioning, to be fair. And going to movies, galleries and bookshops are the things I like to do in spring, autumn and winter too so they’re not really seasonal activities come to think of it.

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Now and then in these summer months I will make an effort despite myself. Last weekend I visited my sister in Liverpool. We went to see the Pet Shop Boys at the M&S Bank Arena right down on the docks (they were great, by the way), took a picnic to the beach at Formby (yes, sand and sandwiches were involved) and generally had a wonderfully pleasant time. (The drive home through the Lake District with the rain almost horizontal and the sky effectively skimming the roof of the car wasn’t much fun, mind. I stopped at Tebay anyway.) This is how it should be, I thought when I was back in Scotland. Getting up and going somewhere and meeting people. I really should do that more often.

And yet as it stands I have no plans to do it again. I’m already sinking back into my normal summer sloth where the days just tick by and by and the books go unread and the trips go unplanned and the sun is mostly hidden from and I think, for the millionth time, I really need to get myself a hobby but do nothing about finding one.

Still, autumn will come in due course. At which point I’ll probably start moaning about that too.