The word summer

In May, outside my window, summer is a warning.

Here the word means the last fortnight of the school year, the airport at two in the morning, a lift full of suitcases, an empty pavement at four in the afternoon. Summer is when the city leaves and the people who stay negotiate with the heat.

Then I write to a customer in Manchester and the same six letters mean the opposite thing.

Summer there is the six good weeks the entire year is arranged around. A garden, a booking, a promise the weather may not keep, permission to be outside without planning it first. There the word is the reward.

So a line about getting ready for summer leaves my desk at one temperature and lands at another. A line about surviving the summer, which is exactly right on my street this month, reads in Manchester as a brand complaining about the best thing that will happen to that reader all year.

Nothing in the sentence is incorrect. Every word is the word. The fault is that a phrase arrives at room temperature, and the room was mine.

It has nothing to do with which language I am working in. This happens in English, between two English-speaking places, with words nobody flags. Fresh. Indoors. Evening. Holiday. Back to school. Each of them carries a climate. An evening in the Gulf in May is the hour the city becomes usable again. An evening in Manchester in December is four o'clock and dark, and the same email is offering two different favours.

So I read the reader's forecast before I read the copy. Not for the weather. To remember what the word will be doing by the time it arrives.

A word carries the weather of the writer's window. The reader only ever has theirs.