It was another gloriously sunny day today. It’s easy to forget that England gets nice weather sometimes when an estimated 85% of our days are overcast.

Everyone is in a better mood in the sunshine. And, judging by the number of people in town, everyone skips work in the sunshine, too. I went to the park and sat in the sun for a bit and there were people from all walks of life all around. There was the chav in the open shirt who kept stroking his chest. There were the noisy, screechy girls. There were excited little kids on their half-term break headed for the playpark. And there was me.

Sitting in the sun is nice. There’s something extremely pleasant about the weather being good enough for you to be able to sit (or indeed lie) on the grass and just relax. If it’s been raining or snowing, or if it’s cold, you’d never even think about lying down on the ground and dozing for a bit. But as soon as it gets a little bit sunny? Everyone seems to come down with narcolepsy. Well, except those people playing frisbee.

Lying in the grass is one of those things that triggers memories, particularly of being very young. I can remember lying on the grass at primary school on hot sunny days. Sometimes my friends and I would just lie there. Other times we’d talk. Other times still we’d attempt to do those stupid moves from P.E. that no-one ever does in real life. And on one memorable occasion, a friend became convinced that by doing a shoulderstand and “squeezing a bit”, he could make himself fart at will. (He couldn’t.)

Besides school, other grassy memories are mostly picnic-related. I have oddly strong memories of visiting the Imperial War Museum at Duxford and sitting in the grass having a picnic as we watched the planes take off, land and do various pieces of death-defying aerobatics. Thinking about it, I don’t think we were actually sitting on the grass, more hanging around the car in deckchairs eating sandwiches. But sandwiches always taste better outside, as everyone well knows.

So it’s been a nice day. A very nice day in fact. Even the fact that I clearly got a bit burnt judging by the tingling on my ears right now (either that or someone’s talking about me) didn’t detract from the niceness of the day. So that’s good. Nice days are good. Nice days are much-needed. Nice days have been away for a long time, so it’s, well, nice to see them again.

Let’s hope this lovely summery weather continues for some time, and that we see more in the way of girls in tiny shorts and less in the way of shirtless bald chavs staggering through parks with cans of Tennents Extra clutched in their desperate sweaty gorilla-hands. And maybe some English people can get a proper tan instead of feeling the need to pointlessly slather themselves with orange paint.