Silly season: a glorious respite from the real world

“What is this if not magic?” The Italian man living as a hobbit.

Igloos discovered in sub-Saharan Africa.

Teenager keeps bumble bee as pet after it followed her home.

Only one of those headlines is made up and, if you can’t tell which one, then that’s surely proof that, for the past few weeks, we’ve been deep in that blissful time of the year known as “silly season”.

It’s the period of not much news, when politicians are away doing whatever it is that politicians do during hot weather (breed, perhaps), and all the top journalists (plus Jeremy Clarkson) head off to their castles in the Alps for a well-earned break, time to work on their unfinished novels, or, in the case of Andrew Marr, develop his next hobby-cum-book-cum-television spectacular. The apprentices and interns are left in charge, and, for two glorious months, the next generation of British journalism drives the nation’s narrative with stories of two-headed turtles (The Independent) and potty-mouthed ducks (The Mirror, “Duck trained to speak in Australia heard muttering ‘you bloody fool’ in clip”).

Silly season is hardly a new phenomenon. The OED traces the origins of the phrase back to at least 1861 when The Saturday Review noted: “We have, however, observed this year very strong symptoms of the Silly Season of 1861 setting in a month or two before its time.” By 1884, The Illustrated London News remarked: “The ‘silly season’ having begun in real earnest, the newspapers are, as a necessary consequence, full of instructive and amusing matter.” As for that “amusing matter”, in August 1897, The Westminster Gazette observed: “Various questions of bathing form the Telegraph’s ‘silly seasoning’ this year.”

Little has changed, even in the pandemic world of 2021, with The Guardian recently offering us “From gong baths to mindful drinking: how to really unwind on a holiday at home”. The Telegraph, not to be outdone, asked “When is too hot to walk my dog?” Even journalists of the 1800s can’t have dreamed of a time when the best way to sell copy in the summer was to make the news about the nation’s dogs.

Yet that doesn’t mean that the summer is all about trivial matters. Mr Francis Lewcock took the opportunity of the silly season in 1939 to bring an important matter to readers of The Times. In a letter, he complained about “the lost apostrophe” on Clements Lane in London. The “matter is raised now, not because it is Silly Season, but the City Corporation have just erected a new street name plate on St. Clement’s Court, which leads out of our lane, and which they have adorned with an apostrophe, good and proper.” Sadly for Mr Lewcock, subsequent events of 1939 meant that the important matter appeared to have been forgotten. Clements Lane still has no apostrophe and continues to be diminished by the far inferior footpath named St. Clement’s Court. Time for another letter, perhaps.

Over the last century, we have become more aware of the silly season phenomenon and have learned to recognise the signs. “Historical finds mark the start of the silly season,” wrote John Young in 1990, noting the announcement of “four historical “discoveries” of varying degrees of credibility”. It’s not entirely clear if anything could top “the least plausible… that the ancient city of Troy was not in Asia Minor at all but at the junction of the A11 and the A604 at Great Abington, near Cambridge”, though in August 2021, we do have The Telegraph announcing: “Wondrous wooden carvings re-emerge after 1,000 years entombed in bird droppings”. One suspects the “wondrous wooden carvings” wouldn’t be so notable without the bird droppings.

Sometimes, however, the fact it is silly season is no accurate measure of a story’s worth. In 2001, Andrew Piece mocked Peter Oborne for claiming to have a scoop about Prince Charles. “The claim by Oborne, a freelance,” wrote Pierce, “that the Queen has reluctantly accepted that Prince Charles should marry Camilla Parker Bowles before he becomes king will not be the first or the last of its kind. Most will be ignored… Even in silly season, a piece which quoted an ‘unnamed well-informed palace observer’ was over the top”. Charles wed Camilla, just four years later.

Silly season was traditionally the time of parliament’s recess in August and September, which means we must be nearing its end for another year. Although igloos haven’t been found in sub-Saharan Africa (that was the fake headline), The Guardian has managed to cover the story of an Italian man living as a hobbit. A teenager has also been keeping a bee as a pet. According to The Daily Mail, “Lacey Shillinglaw, 13, from Coventry, spotted the large bumblebee lying in the road while walking her dog two weeks ago. She scooped up the bee, named Betty, noticing it had a crumpled wing, and tried to put it in a safer spot, on some flowers in a nearby park.”

The story is dated 21 August, meaning the bee probably won’t live to see October. It’s a sad way to end but the end of silly season is always a little dispiriting. It means getting back to the hard graft of unedifying news: tax and infection rates, China’s aggressive stance across the globe, and, perhaps worst of all, the imminent arrival of Christmas, which gets earlier every year (The Sun, “STOCKING UP: I’ve put up my Christmas decorations three months early”, 5 September).

Merry Christmas!