All I Hate About Summer

august 20, 2024 - 00:32

This third-world heat that takes over your bones, leaving you absolutely useless for any human activity. The obligation, as absurd as it is impossible, to learn to disconnect from work and the stresses of life in general, to spend an afternoon being aware of how beautiful it is to look at the landscape without lifting a finger. The need to artificially fill summer afternoons with the reading of nineteenth-century novels that one believes one should read before dying, most of which —especially the Russian ones— are populated by hundreds of indistinguishable characters (Kutuzov, Maria Dmitrievna, Prince Andrei and so on). This dreadful summer fever, very similar to the illness that comes with the turn of the year, according to which one must impose exciting projects for the coming year, all with the aim of improving as a person and exercising the soul.

Then there are the people, who hide quite politely during the other seasons, and now emerge like a plague in every corner of the territory. The repulsive Instagram images, especially those of my forty-something contemporaries who travel and celebrate life as if they were still teenagers, surrounded by work buddies or high school classmates (these are the same ones who gallantly protested against mass tourism in Barcelona and who now irresponsibly cram most of the towns and coves of Formentera, acting like asses all day long).

One must not forget the summer music festivals, most of which present an absolutely mediocre program, with a frankly nauseating lack of aesthetic taste, which is especially alarming in the case of those located in the Empordà. In this special section, it is also worth mentioning the Barcelonians, who invade this land —who knows if the most beautiful in our country— contaminating it with their excessively open vowels and their horrifying habit of peppering our wonderful language with their absurd diminutives: roquetas, pueblecito, barquita and any other vulgarity. Their irruption should be penalized by law, because with them they have brought here a dreadful army of craft markets (all created in factories in China, of course) and an unprecedented accumulation of food trucks on the entire planet.

It is also worth mentioning the obsession of Barcelona residents with dressing as if they were sailors celebrating their first communion, especially ---if they are members of Convergència--- when they are dressed in the usually dreadful white linen trousers.

We would never finish, because we also have to hate with all our might the gastronomic consequences of the Barcelona exodus throughout the country, which ---in the case of Empordà, and excuse my obsession--- translates into a series of tasting menus focused on shrimp of an oceanic bad taste, where our long-suffering restaurateurs even end up including shrimp gazpacho… holy virgin.

We also have to hate with all our might the gastronomic consequences of the Barcelona exodus
We should also hate the summer programming of most of the country's media, which, instead of cheering up our afternoons and evenings with some minimally digestible film, insist on programming "cool spaces" of obvious bad taste. It is not known why, but in summer everything ends up smelling of chlorine and potato chips with cheap olives.It turns out to be somewhat unbearable, as is the current political situation (which used to focus on absurd reports about how our leaders spent their holidays in Cadaqués), and now every afternoon they bore us with the latest news about Puigdemont's excursions.

They certainly have no mercy on us. Faced with so much ignominy, contemplating such a depressing spectacle, one can only end up crying out to heaven to implore a wish: it's called September, please, September.

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About the author

Bernat Dedéu
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