Close your eyes and cast your mind back, if you will, to the summer of 2024. Britain had just crowned a new prime minister, our fortunes in a major football tournament hung in the balance, and the country braced for an incoming heatwave. So far, so déjà vu. But on TikTok there was only one serious question: were you, like Kamala Harris, having a Brat Summer? Were your energies, like those of the would-be POTUS, spent unleashing party girl vibes and embracing self-acceptance to the thumping sounds of Charli XCX?
If that passed you by, perhaps you remember 2025’s Hot Girl Summer? That, you’ll recall, was a viral mantra coined by the American rapper Megan Thee Stallion whose core vibes were mad confidence and unbridled self-empowerment, trends any psychologist will confirm are as easy to slip in and out of as jelly shoes or bodycon. No? Never mind. Because this year, apparently, we’re all supposed to be having a Summer of Whimsy, involving bright colours, dopamine dressing and romanticising the everyday. Presumably this means putting the bins out while dressed as Timmy Mallet.
I’m thankful that there are no grown adults in my acquaintance who would act on these algorithmic memos, other than to groan and roll their eyes. Perhaps though, that’s because no one has yet come up with one that requires less, not more, effort. Which brings me to the positing of my own official holiday 2026 vibe. Forget Brat, because I’m calling it now: welcome to the Summer of the Boomer.
The people born in the post-war years get a bad rep, blamed for everything from casual sexual harassment to climate change. But one thing they really were blindingly good at was fun. As a child growing up in the eighties, the words ‘The Martins are coming over for a drink’ were the happiest sentence in the English language. There would be frantic defrosting of sausages, someone dispatched to Budgens for another bottle of plonk, and roughly six minutes would be spent sweeping clutter into cupboards before the house was declared ‘fine’. By eight o’clock, the adults would be laughing at neighbour-bothering volume in the garden, mosquito coils – along with the grown-ups themselves – smoking away with gusto, and a small pack of children would be going feral, appearing only to raid bowls of illicit Hula Hoops before disappearing back to the bliss of watching an age-inappropriate Blockbuster rental.
Mid-life nostalgia is a powerful thing. And yet I suspect that I am not alone in railing against how a casual drink has acquired the logistics of hosting a minor royal or staging a wedding. Pinterest boards are made, farmers markets visited, flowers ‘sourced’, playlists are ‘curated’, and diligent hosts panic-freeze edible flowers into ice cubes (thank you, Meghan) as if their glass of wine with the neighbours might secretly be being watched, Truman Show-style, by a group of vicious style editors. Instagram has persuaded us that friends are coming round not to see us but to inspect our tablescaping skills – a practice enthusiastically monetised by lifestyle brands selling a polished, export-ready misrepresentation of Englishness.
And all this is assuming that that people still go out at all. A growing faction of millennials prefer to stay at home to knit, bake, do yoga or – perhaps more likely – stare at tablescapers on their phones, gathering inspiration for parties they will never have. We’ve optimised spontaneity out of existence and, like the curse of perfectionists the world over, the abiding notion is that if you don’t try, you can’t fail. Except, of course, that you already have, by talking yourself out of the very thing you were trying to perfect.
The first rule is that no one is allowed to apologise for the state of the house
It all taps into a bloodlessly timid generational shift from the Rivals-era raucousness our parents lived – albeit in rather less grand houses – to an expectation of standards so punitive that it means that we don’t actually do anything but gaze at what we could be doing if funds, socials circles and temperaments allowed.
The happy news is that in Boomer Summer you can’t, in fact, fail. The first rule is that no one is allowed to apologise for the state of the house. The second is that the children exist in a parallel universe, playing British Bulldog outside until someone cries, drinking banned cans of Coke and becoming progressively grubbier as darkness falls. The third is that nobody dreams of photographing the highly unphotogenic nibbles. In Boomer summer, there shall be no organised activities and no parental hovering; simply everyone going free-range until finally a taxi arrives to spirit away the guests and their pyjama-clad children. (Yes, even we draw the line at some Boomer practices; driving home after a skinful of Blue Nun, for example.)
So, this summer I am rejecting Brat, Hot Girl and whatever algorithmically-generated mood board arrives next. I’m aiming for Boomer Summer – not, I imagine, that it will catch on, since there will be no documenting and no hashtagging of a single burnt sausage, packet of Pringles, or bottle of Tesco Finest wine. The defining characteristic of Boomer Summer is, after all, that nobody knows you’re having one. Here’s a radical notion: perhaps the point of fun is not to perform it, but just, you know, to have it.
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