Geoff Lemon's Ashes Diary: England's blue, unclouded weather

On my first visit to England, it’s been fascinating to finally come in contact with a culture that has so strongly informed my own. In doing so, you learn that even the apparently familiar has aspects you’ve never considered.

We arrived to a weekend of utter perfection. The kind of warmth that makes an afternoon unfold itself before you like widespread arms. Flawlessly clear skies of a blue you could almost taste.

Our friend Richie’s garden was a small green oasis in Hackney, dense foliage overhead, vines cloaking the old brick of the high street wall, raspberry canes bearing fruit whose warmth and flavour burst like jam in your mouth, deckchairs in those patches of sunlight that seem almost viscous as they mix through glowing blades of grass.

Immediately, it called to mind the bucolic England of H.E. Bates, that land where Pop Larkin and his sprawling family so lavishly enjoyed life.

No doubt the raspberries played a part: my pre-adolescent blood had been stirred considerably by the role of that same fruit in the heady orchard romance of Primrose and Reverend Candy.

But self-discovery aside, I could suddenly appreciate the intensity of Bates’ broader depiction. Around the corner in London Fields, it was like a rock concert had just let out.

The immense parklands were teeming with people drinking, laughing, playing cricket, cooking portable barbeques, smoke plumes mingling in a delicious haze.

The atmosphere was one of happy energy, of people making the most of the day they had. Coming from our modestly populated cities, to find this on an ordinary weekend was a culture shock of the most thoroughly enjoyable kind.

And so we’ve sailed through the next two weeks, with only one day of Nottingham grey and some scattered clouds today at Lord’s to break a run of clear blue wonders.

Everywhere we’ve gone, people have remarked on our good fortune with the weather. Initially we brushed this off as idle observation, but it isn’t.

Anecdotally, this is the first decent summer in years. Anecdotally, the British summer is more often a cold grey disappointment. Australian discussions of weather are grimly dutiful. Here they’ve been offered with genuine excitement.

With this, the significance has become clear. Weather is pre-eminent in Australia’s consciousness as it is in Britain’s, recurring consistently in our conversation, art and literature. But this, my theory runs, is something we’ve inherited.

For equatorial writers, descriptions of weather are essentially confined to whether it’s raining or whether it isn’t. As far south as Melbourne and we have seasons, but our perfect sunny days each year still number in the dozens, with more than half our weather being very reasonable.

To Australians, Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” probably reads as little more than passably nice, a kind of archaic, “You look good in that dress.”

Yet in a land where perfect sunny warmth, speaking as it does of fertility and promise and potential and ease, may only come along a handful of times across multiple years, even that genius of vocabulary could conjure no more potent nor flattering comparison.

It wasn’t just about the gentleness and depth of those perfect English days themselves, but about their scarcity, their anticipation, their place in memory, and the level of immersion in their enjoyment.

Even as I write this, late sun is lancing through the scattered clouds and the press box windows, causing those in the front row to squint into their screens like soft pale mariners attempting to read a horizon.

As long as these fine summer days last, Cam and I will continue to treat them with the complacent enjoyment bred into us by Australia’s generous climate. The locals will treat them with the worship that perhaps nature’s perfection more rightly deserves.

It is with similar gratitude, passion and revelling that the English are greeting their Ashes position.

All of this is something new to them. To go into a series as favourites. To actually deliver on that. To handle the pressure. To be the side who comes through in the close contests. To have the ruthlessness to crush the opposition when well on top.

These are not the English cricket values of recent decades, but they have been instilled into this team, and the fans can still scarcely believe it.

Time and again in our interviews with passers-by, the sentiments have been repeated, the memories exhumed: how they grew up expecting to see their side get flogged, how the loud and tanned and confident Australians simply aimed their conveyor belt of talent in a tentative England’s direction.

“I had to wait until I was 22 to see England win an Ashes,” said one young fellow yesterday.

“You’d go into a series just hoping for something, be happy with that one Mark Butcher day out at Headingley, think 4-1 wasn’t so bad.”

And yet, as so many generations have done with the English weather, their patience or fatalism allowed them to wait it out, suffering through it because that’s what life demanded, perhaps not even considering that one day there would be a change.

Now, in England, that change has come. Australia’s team is shattered, trailing by five centuries on a ground they once ruled for 75 years.

Overhead, the clouds have parted, the sun is shining, and the odd passing cloud – or three early wickets – can’t break the high-pressure system.

According to the voice on the street, this is the biggest heatwave in years, the best summer, a most remarkable period of happiness.

The biggest source of joy, in a place where things change quickly, is just how consistently it’s sticking around.