Eva Bradley: Don't fall for summer's flirtations

FORGIVE me the blasphemy but I simply have to say it: Goddamn you, impending summer. Like the high school flirt, you walk around the block and our instant reaction is to smile at you and flush red with delight when you smile back and light up our life with sunshine and the promise of something just a little better than what we had yesterday - which was rain and pre-teen temperatures.

But as summer struts closer, the self-doubt and scrutiny sets in; are we good enough for her? Are we ready? Can we take off our clothes and bare our pasty winter bodies to her after so many cold winter nights with only chocolate to keep us company?

The answer is a big fat "no". Though we all want her, none of us feels ready for summer, and like so many high school flirts, she knows it, too.

In late October, when the running shoes are only just being dusted off and you haven't yet broken up with the TV remote in order to make room in your life for summer, you get a surprise visitor.

Six weeks early she's there to surprise you as you step out of the office in your winter-weight pants ... all 25C of her, so hot you break into a sweat that makes your clothes cling in all the wrong places. So you strip off all the outer layers in a bid to be cool, rocking the merino singlet as though it was meant to be worn on the outside.

"Fake it till you make it" as you walk around town with a spring in your step (because it is still spring after all) but with summer all over you, reminding you how much you miss her.

Rushing home, you pull out all the clothes you wore on hot summer dates last year and bury all your winter clothes in deep recesses where they can't be found. Particularly the next morning when you wake up to find summer has left town without a word.

Although she has the cold heart, you're the one with the cold body, shivering on the doorstep, caught out like a fool with the winter coat nowhere to be found.

Convinced her absence is only temporary, you persist with your commitment to the summer wardrobe, watching the weather forecast suspiciously and then despairingly as you see summer left you to head down south and fool around with the poor buggers in Invercargill.

No doubt they needed her more there, so the heartbreak when she inevitably ditches them to return north will be worse. But just when that will be is anyone's guess, and so until that time one can simply persist with the plan to get back in shape and look so smoking hot next time she returns that she'll stay for good. Or at least shack up till late April with some sizzling El Nino action.

But that's asking for commitment, and in the roaring forties, where one of our most well-known songs, Weather With You, is about four seasons in one day, it's a brave person who commits to one season only.

And so it is that I have woollen coats pushed up against short cotton skirts in my wardrobe, and merino turtlenecks vying for space in the middle draw beside floaty spaghetti-strap singlets.

Summer may come and go as she pleases and spread herself around the country with faithless indifference, but I have taken a few tricks from her own book and mastered the art of the mid-season commitment-phobe wardrobe.

-Eva Bradley is a columnist and photographer.