Thinking of Old Summers

The time-lapsed summer is back again. Felt it as soon as I stepped out of the house this morning; bright, hazy sunlight, the seagull cries, the foamy sea-taste on the air.
Remember as a child, the months leading up to summer. That sense of climax, of things leading somewhere. The summer holidays of course. Each one was different, had their own feelings and resonance and obsessions. The magical summer of 1982 (Scotland, ghost hunting and base building in woods) and 1986 (London, first kisses and thrash metal albums). Then the other summers, the isolation of summer 1987 (no friends living near me - best friend Leighton having moved away) and the apocalypse-tinged summer of 1990 (the heat, just finished school, the future a frightening unknown vortex). Actually, wasn't just the summer of childhoods that had their own identity, their own soul, but those summers of the 1990s, that long decade of colleges and universities. The deep English-fever of the summer of 1995 and 1996, the summer of 1997, living in the 200 year old house on London Road in Worcester. Then the last summer of 1999. In Cornwall, after finishing my degree - another apocalypse summer, Nostradamus and the eclipse. Too much imagination, heat and time...
And then you leave school, or university, or college, and you work instead, and summers don't seem to have their own identity any more. They just merge into one homogenous mass. But then there is that beautiful slipping down into the beginning of autumn during September.
That time never seems to lose its power.