Does anybody ever get over the nostalgia for the six-week summer holidays? The last time I had more than two uninterrupted weeks away from work I was 16 but I still find myself thinking back to summer days waking up with weeks unplanned time stretching out in front of me – the main concern in my life being scouting around W H Smith and Woolworths (!) for a new pencil case to take to school in September. The feeling of being put out that I don’t get such a break now is probably not helped by the fact that my mother, my sister and one of my best friends are teachers but such is life!
Somehow it seems that the work we get up to in the summer should be more fun – the equivalent of saying ‘miss can we work outside’ on an end of term day of glorious sunshine. We have some fun stuff going on at Cardiff BID with our on-street table tennis on The Friary, our support of Mill Lane Arts week and our efforts in promoting everyone else’s summer fun (do tweet us @Cardiff_BID if there’s something you’d like to promote). There’s also a sense of getting ourselves ready, doing the maths homework and the required reading that all good students are supposed to get done sometime between mid-July and early September – we’ve been working on removing some of the abandoned bikes taking up much needed space in the city’s cycle racks, we’ve just wrapped up a survey assessing our members training needs meaning that come the autumn we’ll be literally sending businesses back to school for heavily discounted or even free training.
Even though for most of us the dream of a long summer holiday is long gone there is still something which feels a little relaxed about the summer and that’s followed by a certain productive feeling about the autumn, we might say it’s the back to school buzz even for those of us who haven’t been away. The list of projects that we will be kick starting once the seasons change is getting more substantial and exciting by the week. Keep your eyes peeled for news of our autumn update event so that you are one of the very first people to find out more and in the meantime, get out and enjoy the sun, maybe even fit in a game of table tennis while you can. Summer won’t last forever, in fact the Ambassadors have recently started talking about the office Christmas dinner!