At the convention, we caught the end of Anneke Willis' talk. She played companion Polly in the 60s, and I have yet to see her in an episode. She was rhapsodising on the joys, and indeed recommending, getting an old bath in the garden in the summer time, filling it with a hose and stripping off. At the time, it struck me as a bit of an odd thing to say in a room packed with strange male sci-fi nerds (and for all I know, the few female sci-fi nerds as well) who'd probably had a creepy Princess Leia thing going for her since they were five. This morning I woke up, and it was the first idea that popped into my head, cursing the fact our garden is so visible to the public - the Douzane room on one side, a school on the other.

And that set me off on a rant about how badly the summer SUCKS. The evidence for the prosecution is as follows:

Sleep
My favourite activity in the world, bar none, is spoilt by the hot weather. You can't cosy up in a huge, huggly duvet at this temperature, and you invariably wake up hot, sweaty and miserable.
I can't bear to leave the windows open overnight either, because of...

Insects
Don't like em. Don't like seeing them hurt either, but I'd really rather they got the hell out of my house. Chasing out flies, catching spiders, and watching my poor piano get covered in cobwebs. Not nice.

Air Conditioning
Summer is designed to make my inner enviromentalist panic. The one thing I loathe more than being too hot is air conditioning. I hate it with a firey passion - you're using up electricity, to make the room cooler, which will in the long run result in the world getting hotter. This means I spend much of the summer moooooaning because I'm warm and miserable, yet refusing to use an electric fan or similar. After three weeks, this behavior irritates even me.

Clothing
It's not like I don't have a summer wardrobe - I've loads from that year when I wanted to be Alabama from True Romance, a look that never really worked and I still don't know why. Yet hats, coats and scarfs make up the basis of my style (such as it is), and I've had a rolling collection of long-sleeved-plain-stretchy-tops, usually in white, since the age of 12. Even ignoring the fact warm weather kills any attempt to dress Doctory, I fail at anything which doesn't require layers.

Eating
Another favourite activity, and one I totally fail at for the summer. I'm like the opposite of a hibernating hamster. The warm weather kills off my desire to eat anything more substantial than salad or fruit smoothie, and combined with my general forgetfulness about food, means I spend the entire holiday faintly worrying that I'm anorexic.
Being inside
In this heat, the last thing you want to do is be stuck inside. Which is a bind for me, as all my favourite activities require a controlled enviroment - drawing, reading, collating sheets of paper, watching films, playing piano. Speaking thus:

Film watching
Reflections on the screen mega bother me, and are a large problem at this time of year.

Summer blockbusters
Summer fails at decent cinema. Ignoring the fact cinemas are even stuffier and nastier than usual, studios release all their loud and obnoxious movies at this time. Autumn and winter is far better for my favourite fare, and early spring is the home of Oscar-bait.

Boring weather
Winter. Storms, overcast, hail, snow, just a little gray, unusually sunny, fogs, crisp early morings, chucking it down. Oh, there are so many winters and so many winter skies. Summer is one thing: blue, warm, no clouds. It gets very boring after a week. It easily lacks the variety of the late months, the many different shades of "bad weather".

Music This is a big one, strangely enough, considering it is also totally idiosyncratic. I get very picky about the right atmosphere for music. I've been irritating my family for a year now with my insistance that piano nocturnes only work past midight. My default split is music "warm" and music "cold". Most of my favourite bands and albums fall into the latter catagory: Chopin, Wagner, opera full stop, Pink Floyd, Marillion, Genesis - most prog - half of Kate Bush's Aerial, Suede, the Smiths, 10CC, Kraftwerk, Robbie Williams, the Donnie Darko soundtrack. The music enhances the weather, the weather enhances the music. Sure, there's some music which does cover summer - the Doors, Jefferson Airplane and other hippy-stoner hits, most Led Zeppelin, the Beach Boys, Mozart, half of Kate Bush's Aerial, Tarantino soundtracks (see: year when I wanted to be Alabama from True Romance). But it's a fairly bad tradeoff.
Public transport
Ignoring those times you crank up the stereo with summery music, take the softop down and pretend you're on Ventura Highway or Route 66, transport is just horrible. Opening up the car to find the seatbelts are burning, buses and trains full stop.

Too warm to do anything constructive
I tend to wilt in the afternoons. It's the heat - I cease being useful. When you wake up, and it's hot, and it gets hotter, and then gets slightly less hot later on, I've lost the desire and willpower to fufill any of those projects of mine.

Of course, there are some benefits. Sunlight through the trees ranks in my top five things in the universe, I like early mornings when the sunlight wakes you naturally, and it's nice to give my Doors collection a runaround once a year. Still...