All over Britain there are now many mild days in Nov-Mar and many when temperatures surge up into double figures. We never used to experience that as possible in 1970s-80s winters, whatever your casual view is on climate change. I say that remembering those winters in South Wales, and now being based in and preferring the climate further north that's supposed to be relatively cooler!
In the present early winter, Britain actually has already had one snowy cold snap, but on either side of it a lot of milder time, and I saw really strikingly what that was like at south coast latitude. I was in Southampton on Nov 24-5 and 9 Dec 2023, both dates when the weather was bright and more springlike than used to be possible at those dates in childhood memory, but Dec 9 had a nippy windiness too.
There were loads of folks wearing shorts. Not just one in a day. Not a few one-off sensory issue outriders like when folks see me on colder days. No. There were many. Still a minority, but steady stream of them everywhere and all through the day. Like just as casually ordinary to do then as in summer. Both adults and kids alike, as is good for social freedom. So that for Dec 9 it could be predicted from the earlier memory, and that prediction was right!
Social progress carries a painful mix of emotions, as all good feeling about it, in place of the anger there would be at not having it, is always mixed with anger at past memory of not having it. It would be less possible to have an undiscovered shorts sensory issue in your childhood if this had used to happen at winter dates then.
This experience in Southampton is a much further, deeper scale, conditions shift and culture shift with it, to see, than already the striking but handful number of shorts I saw being happily worn on a frostier day in Manchester Feb 2019.
Go back another 2 days to Dec 7, I was on the return leg (how freudian) to Southampton aboard a P+O cruise ship, hugging the Bay of Biscay on a prospectively stormy Atlantic day just as it crossed from balmy Iberian back to colder British air. Aboard there too it was wonderful to see that most of the folks who had taken on the comfort of shorts in Iberia, of all ages, found comfort in them and chose to remain in it, securely among each other in this holiday setting. That too felt as an enlightenment for many and cultural advance, though seen only inside its own bubble where the media and rest of the country are oblivious to it.
Money of course affects who gets to take cruises and how frequently, even at a time when it's worth knowing there are some cheap bargain ones around as they try to recover from covid. It was still not something I could afford to do at all in my Thatcher generation and pre-diagnosis youth. Coping ability with the bureaucratic preparations for them is a concern that some may feel overwhelmed by, print a boarding pass and proof of insurance, fill in a medical needs questionnaire and an emergency contact form and your passport number. But the practical reason to take cruises is that they are a much easier more safely organised for you way to travel than a self-organised holday. Their slow reemergence from covid has sifted the arrogant from the careful, as only within this year has there ended a requirement to take a covid test just before the cruise and not be allowed to come if it resulted positive. Last winter the company Fred Olsen was taking an outrageous line of no refunds if that happened and leaving it to claim from your travel insurance with all that can be bad in that! P+O at present is providing its own inhouse insurance deal that is part of its trading with you, so makes the refund so too, and as said, you no longer have to test before coming: which is why this was my first cruise post-covid.
I'm writing about it in furtherance of dress freedom and social ease of wearing shorts: yet that is exactly something that cruises traditionally have not been associated with and have been oppressors against. Anyone with my absolute and identity defining opposition to all dress codes will only take a cruise that is possible to go through the whole of without at any time submitting to a dress code, to keep away from all the places where they have them. But when you can do that, it is actively a good feeling to take part in rolling back the boundaries and being part of the solidarity of so doing, thus helping to reduce the dress coded culture and keep it constrained enough to be optable out of. Thus on this cruise it just meant I needed to opt out of all the onboard events and bars in the evenings and spend them mostly in my cabin. Enquiry before booking established that it was not dress coded to go to the buffet for supper, or to return aboard from a port we were still at into the evening. It was even a pleasure to find myself joining other shorts wearers, adult and kid, in successfully establishing something not found out in advance, that sightseeing on the open air decks did not become dress coded in the evening either.
So it was actively a nice action against dress codes to take the cruise. It gave this wonderfully revelatory nice experience that needs sharing, where many Brits on the day of sailing back into our climate in December shared among themselves, in the confidence of numbers, the comfort choice to stay in the shorts they had started wearing while in a neighbouring warmer climate.
Maurice Frank
12 Dec 2023
