Fresh liaisons over a long not so hot summer (Diary) By Karl Whitney The Guardian, Tuesday 20th July 1999 - - - - Summer is a time when you can lose touch with your college friends, sink into an existentialist depression or take a dead-end job that starts to look like a good opportunity for an undemanding career after a couple of weeks. Or is that just my summer? The break-up of everything for the summer means going out for drinks with people you don't know or like - friends of friends who ask you what you're doing over the holidays. They're going to France or America or Europe or India and you wish them a safe journey, though you don't mean it. I wish them no specific harm, nothing fatal, you understand, just enough to make them think twice about leaving these isles without a good lawyer. Or is summer a time for meditation on the year you've just spent/wasted, and a welcome chance to study for the exams you'll probably have to repeat in the autumn? What it certainly isn't, at least round my way, is a warm and sunny chance to sit in the heat-blasted outdoors and read a book or engage in conversation with a pretty girl in a flowery dress whose folks are loaded. Maybe I'm just an old-fashioned romantic, but - imagine - when her parents pop their clogs, then she'll be moneyed and mine; bobbed hair and bulging bank balance. As a result, I'll be able to jet off to foreign climes whenever the mood needles me. See, I wasn't born to be a student, although the level of indolence required by your average undergraduate appeals to me. No, not for me the grubby flats and grotty shirts and cold mornings and bad hair. I mean, my lifestyle doesn't square with that of a student; already I've drunk champagne from the shoe of a busty blonde starlet. Unfortunately, her foot was in it at the time, thus complicating an otherwise foolproof ruse. But, as I speak, the rain is hammering down outside, the windows are frosting over and no pretty heiresses are to be seen. The weatherman is forecasting snow, and predicting some sunlight around late August. So it looks like another average summer in prospect, then. • Karl Whitney is studying arts (English, sociology and history) at University College Dublin. To read this piece on the Guardian site click here -------- Journalism | Stories | Home | About