Twelve summers ago, just before our first child was born, my wife and I almost quit our sensible London jobs to run a smokehouse in Suffolk. We’d never run a smokehouse before. We’d never even run a business before. But we were awfully fond of smoked cod’s roe. And Suffolk.
I stumbled upon the email the other day, while searching for something else. It was almost comic in its naivety. A fledgling family offering to take on an established, struggling family business. No thought of notice periods or maternity pay or balance sheets or smoking techniques (you just whack the fish on the head, take a deep breath and shove it up the chimney, right?). As with parenting, we’d make it up as we went along. The family said a polite no, and we returned to London, an emergency C-section and a different sort of adventure.
It wasn’t, however, the first – or last – time that the summer sun has gone to my head. In 1999, while teaching English in an Arab village in Israel, a friend and I came within a whisker of buying a beat-up Beetle and vanishing in the middle of the night, Tracey Chapman’s Fast Car playing on an ironic mix tape as we headed slowly towards Cape Town. Three summers later, during a long university holiday, another friend and I talked endlessly about abandoning our degrees and driving a tuk-tuk home from India.
This tomfoolery continued even after my prefrontal cortex had reached its supposed maturity. Five summers – and three children – after the smokehouse near-miss, my wife and I sat with a bottle of Cretan retsina, earnestly discussing the possibility of opening an English language school on the island. Our bronzed, barefoot, bi-lingual children would live off figs and honey, tending the family goat and tickling tuna to sell to gullible tourists.
There are similar themes in all these situations (and I’ve spared you some of the more tedious ones). There’s the promise of adventure. An enduring streak of juvenilia. A desire to dodge responsibility. The delicious notion of throwing a hand grenade into one’s ordered, middle-class life. And, of course, the stepping back from the brink every time.
I suspect I’m not alone in these unfulfilled fantasies – and I also wonder if it’s a peculiarly British affliction. Perhaps only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday, Mediterranean sun and dream about running creative writing classes in a French château, buying a Tuscan vineyard or teaching their children Homer while they sail around the world?
August casts a strange spell that suspends time and reality, making your ordered, settled life feel somehow provisional and unchosen. Away from routine, you’re free to dream without consequences, to entertain big, bad ideas that don’t need to be unpicked, let alone actioned. A conversation about a Cretan language school has little to do with planning permission and marketing schemes; it’s about family and love and community. And I’m fairly sure that our tuk-tuk conversation focused more on the beautiful Goan girls and charming, armed bandits we’d almost certainly meet en route than on visas and spare parts for a greasy, two-stroke engine.
August seductively suggests that there’s another, lighter version of yourself, just out of reach, one that doesn’t have to worry about commutes or schools or pensions. August dreaming is a summer romance with those you already love. It’s the conversational equivalent of losing yourself in a beach read, imagining that you’re Jack Reacher, a maverick 6’5” law enforcer of no fixed abode, instead of a mid-height, mid-ranking, middle-aged accountant from Godalming.
But of course, August is the aberration, not the norm. Most of real life takes its cue from September, when the summer’s spell is swiftly broken in a flurry of new school shoes and unread LinkedIn profile updates. So, perhaps it’s no bad thing that these fantasies remain fictitious. The Suffolk smokehouse closed before we were out of hospital with our first child. If we’d stayed in Crete with her siblings, they would probably have ended up as club reps in Malia.
You can mourn the roads less travelled – or you can carry the idealised version of them with you. I’ve never driven to Cape Town, but the journey I’ve made a hundred times in my mind’s eye is probably better than the reality would ever have been. Not all dreams need to be realised. Some of them remind you of what you value, as well as what you long for; what you have, as well as what you lack. There’s merit in the dreams themselves, long after reality’s rude awakening.
And as for actually fulfilling any of them? Well, there’s always next August.
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