Silly season is here to cheer us all up

Every year, there is a period of time in summer when the news all but dries up. In Europe and the US, governments take a summer break, politics goes briefly quiet and journalists are left scratching their heads and clutching at straws to fill empty newspaper columns and pages.

In the UK, it is a time commonly known as “silly season” owing to the frivolous stories that find their way to the front pages. The phrase is said to have been coined by The Times of London in 1861 when it published a piece headlined “The Silly Season” explaining the concept: “When Parliament is no longer sitting and the gay world is no longer gathered together in London, something very different is supposed to do for the remnant of the public from what is needed in the politer portions of the year.”

Meanwhile, in Europe, this time of year goes by a different name. In Czech, Danish, Dutch, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Polish and Slovak it is known as “cucumber time”, owing to the abundance of the green vegetable at this time of year. According to the newsletter, The Knowledge, Germans, Estonians and Croatians go one step further, calling it “pickled cucumber season”. 

Pickled cucumber season typically arrives in late summer and continues into the early autumn, but this year, traces of the season are appearing earlier than ever. After a particularly heavy start to the year with the conflict in Ukraine, the cost-of-living crisis and a seemingly never-ending stream of government scandals dominating our headlines, perhaps people need silly season more than ever.

Here are the first glimpses of silly season that might provide brief relief from the doom and gloom of a very negative news cycle.

This year’s silly season unexpectedly kicked off at the Chelsea Flower Show when a mysterious woman tripped and fell into a pond at the event, only to be saved by TV chef Ainsley Harriot. The woman was later revealed to be his sister, who had tripped into the pond and ingested a lot of water but fully recovered shortly after, as reported in the Evening Standard. 

Meanwhile, AP News reported the strange news that Swedish retailer IKEA had decided to branch out from furniture and home furnishings to help the world come up with unique baby names. Since 1948, IKEA has been naming products after Swedish towns, lakes and traditional names. Now, they have collated more than 800 listings into a “name bank” on the IKEA Norway website. In a statement, IKEA noted that despite retailers experiencing a shortage of “raw materials and challenges with delivery times” throughout the pandemic, there was no shortage of children, so they decided to put their brand to good use. Names are listed alongside their meaning and the year they were used and include; “Edda” (Quite straightforward, but surprises in some places, 1966), “Agneta” (Graceful and comfortable, 1965) and “Ranfrid” (Is transparent for most, 1999). How’s that for thinking outside the flatpack box?

The most obvious indication of the beginning of silly season, however,  has come in the form of small yellow cartoon characters called minions, which are all over the front pages this week thanks to a TikTok trend. The #gentleminions trend involves teenagers attending screenings of the new Universal Pictures children’s film, Minions: The Rise of Gru, wearing suits and copying the mannerisms of the film’s villain, Gru. The Gen-Z crowds of up to 30 teenagers have gone viral on TikTok for enthusiastically clapping and cheering at the screening, appearing as if they are attending their prom afterwards. One cinema in Cornwall has banned “unaccompanied children wearing suits” and others are complaining about the raucous behaviour scaring off children and families. Universal Pictures are unsurprisingly supportive of the trend which is boosting box office numbers, tweeting, “to everyone showing up to @Minions in suits: we see you and we love you”. If that isn’t a silly season story I don’t know what is.

Some would undoubtedly argue there is too much bad news in the world for silly season this year, and it’s easy to see why. But hidden amid the gloom-ridden news stories are laughs aplenty. Silly season is off to a good start and I’m sure there are plenty more pickled cucumbers to come.