Petty climate change complaints: there are no good seasons anymore

It might seem unreasonable to have petty complaints about the climate crisis when there are so many profound complaints to have. Deadly heatwaves, landslides, threats to the food supply – we all know all this, we all try to avoid thinking about it most of the time because you've got to get through the day somehow. I don't think it's particularly healthy or productive to dwell on these more existential consequences of our collective refusal to protect the environment. But venting our frustration with the smaller, sillier annoyances will surely do us all good.

I don't mean silly annoyances necessarily, you understand, just sillier than widespread death and destruction.

Anyway, there are no good seasons anymore.

It's a coincidence probably that I saw Hadestown for the first time a few weeks ago – a musical set in a world where marital tension between Hades and Persephone have led to the loss of autumn and spring – but boy does that show feel timely. Because we have had no autumn and no spring this year. We went straight from highs of 11 to highs of 30, we had a few months of heatwaves and droughts, maybe three weeks that felt like normal summer and now we're full in the grot of early winter.

I have always hated autumn in the UK, harbinger that it is of the long dark, of the grey times, of the dank miseries. But this year I didn't even get to ease elegantly into it. It's just suddenly cold and grim and horrible.

It's not that the loss of a real spring and autumn doesn't fill me with existential dread, it's just that it pisses me off for smaller, sillier reasons as well.

Summer in the UK has become something you fight. The country was simply not built for temperatures over 30 degrees; neither its infrastructure nor its people. And look, not to be all but it's a dry heat but I grew up with 30 degrees in summer being fairly normal and it simply hits different here. Maybe it's just London. It's so built up, there aren't enough cooling breezes, it's oppressively humid. (Although I will say it's noticeably less clammy and cloying in recent years, I feel like you can really feel the lack of pollution when it's hot now, thank you for the ULEZ Sadiq.)

On the other hand, winter is so depressing. It never even snows here anymore! We've long since given up hope of a truly white Christmas, but you hardly ever see a proper blanketing of snow at all anymore! A few flurries and that's it! Apart from rendering the entirety of the cold dark miserably grey.

It's grim and unpleasant and a devastating loss for the concept of romantic comedies set in London.

This is a crucial, petty point, actually. Now that the seasons are so very fucked up we lose great seasonal fiction.

We tried to watch some heatwave cinema this year in one or other of the many heatwaves, and I thought while watching that this is something you just can't really do anymore. In fiction, traditionally, a heatwave is something that throws society sideways a little. Everyone's on edge, the real rules don't apply, strange things happen. There was something off that summer — this is the promise of a heatwave story. But that's just summer now so there's nowhere to go!

Admittedly, part of a heatwave movie is how inappropriately everyone is dressed for it. People are going to work and they're wearing suits and ties and tailored dresses and heels and it doesn't work! They're drenched with sweat and they're uncomfortable and it looks so cool.

We dress, by and large, much more casually now. There are many reasons for that and I wouldn't have it otherwise. But in a cooler world (literally) wearing a suit in summer wouldn't be such a wild thing to do and we could still imagine a world where this happens:

(Admittedly it doesn't have the same effect in a gif, but Toshiro Mifune spends all of Stray Dog wearing a suit, soaked in sweat, looking extremely handsome.)

We don't take it seriously, and there's a reason for that, but one of the impacts of capitalism is that it makes everything less cool. Capitalism bends towards big business and we end up with every local high street looking the same; a series of chains owned by venture capital firms, designed in a board room, trying to extract value from a community without engaging with it in any meaningful way.

I think it's destroying the culture less directly as well. The incentives of capitalism have led to a climate crisis that is, as discussed, killing people, but is also rendering the world less enjoyable. I don't think we should let it off its petty crimes simply because it's guilty of far more egregious things.

We deserve it all. We deserve a survival planet and we deserve for that planet to be full of nice times and cool vibes.

We deserve four seasons.