Shirtless builders, ice cream vans and WhatsApp chaos: the real signs spring has sprung
For some it’s the first snowdrop, bravely nuzzling through the hardened ground of late winter. For others it’s when dusk manages to hold off until after 6pm, allowing us to leave our workplaces with at least a small feeling that there’s something of the day left for us. But for Julian Clary, who never disappoints, it is the sight of roofers stripped to the waist.
To him, it seems, that’s a sign spring is coming.
“Is there a competition for the first sighting of a shirtless roofer in 2021?” Clary wrote on Twitter earlier this week, “If so, can I enter myself? (Don’t answer that).” The line accompanied a photograph of, yes, a bare-chested roofer, roofing it up like it’s at least 18 degrees warmer than it actually was on Monday.
It does raise an interesting point, though. We each have our individual signs that spring has sprung in Britain, but what are they, really?
Wildly confusing clothing choices
A group of four walking through the park. Like a rubbish version of the Village People, one person is dressed as an Arctic explorer, another shivering in a light spring jacket, chinos and trainers, another in a T-shirt but with a woollen overcoat draped over their arm just in case, and a fourth in shorts, vest and flip flops.
Other than that, he wears only a self-congratulatory badge of pride and the early symptoms of hypothermia. It is 8 degrees Celsius, but the badge will keep him warm.
Salads are considered a viable main
After months of heavy pasta dishes, Sunday (and Monday, Tuesday etc) roasts, hearty casseroles, curries and anything to fill a hole and warm you up during the cruel months of winter, somebody in your household suggests you “just have a salad” tonight. “Salad” is not a word you have used since last September, so you look it up online.
“A cold dish of various mixtures of raw or cooked vegetables, usually seasoned with oil, vinegar, or other dressing and sometimes accompanied by meat, fish, or other ingredients,” you read. Ah, yes, you remember those.
A negotiation ensues, before agreement that it would be best to start a transitional period: first side salads, then salads with obscene amounts of meat or cheese or croutons in, then salads with warm ciabatta in case it isn’t enough, then actual salads. You are, if it hadn’t become clear by now, very middle class.
The first suspicious trill of an ice cream van jingle
In my neighbourhood of London, I am 90 per cent sure that the local ice cream van serves a range that includes a few things not explicitly intended for children. Or law-abiding citizens.
From early spring until late December, Mr Softee* offers ice creams to park-goers in the daytime, but seems most active after dark, prowling the streets playing a catchy tune, before waiting cautiously on a corner while conspicuous-looking adults shuffle up, check for any ice cream inspectors, and receive what I can only assume is a new kind of choc-ice in a small, clear plastic bag.
It gets annoying, after seven months, but there’s a calming consistency to that jingle. And the other day, at 9pm on a Friday (prime ice cream time), the tune rung out for the first time this year. Spring is coming.
*Names have been changed. I’m not a grass.
Insects, loads of them
I saw a wasp the other day. Yes, in February. In a pandemic. Amidst a global recession. At least I think it was a wasp, it might have been a very small, yellow bird, or a clump of cigarette butts hurled at the window.
Regardless, it was a sign – nay, a warning – that they are coming. Coming for our picnics, coming for our open bottles of Stella, coming for our lockdown jam. And wasps are just one winged beast that arrive as soon as the last frost’s defrosted.
A report in the news today reveals that Britain’s moths have declined by a third in the last 50 years, which is troubling, but it does mean that two-thirds of Britain’s moths are still out there, and the clothes moth’s larvae wants your winter knits.
Next it’ll be mosquitos, then the aphids, then the midges, and then – if recent headlines are to be believed – the turn of the stinkbugs. Grab your weapons. (And by weapons, I mean empty glasses and bits of card, to humanely trap things and safely release them again in the forest.)
WhatsApp planning chaos
It always ratchets up at this time of year, as people panic book holidays and the like, but it is especially bad in 2021, when Boris Johnson’s roadmap has started a countdown towards capital-F Fun so pressurising that it’s reasonable to half-hope a new variant is discovered that cancels some of the 492 social events already mooted in your WhatsApp groups.
Rescheduled dates, proposed group holidays with people you haven’t seen since 2019 and hoped might have lost your number, links to some dodgy festival that insists it’s still going ahead, even just “Shall we go to the pub on May 22nd at 7pm?”. Suddenly your social calendar for late spring looks like Rita Ora’s in a quiet lockdown month. How long until winter, again?
The first twitching, sniffling, itching of hayfever
How? There’s still frost on the ground? Maybe it’s Covid. It’s probably just Covid.
