What should I wear on a British summer holiday?

Forget the cute shorts and rope sandals – pack your wellingtons and woollens instead. You can't bring on warm weather by dressing for it, and there's no point freezing to death.

I'm going on a girly break in Cornwall next week and am in a fashion quandary. I don't want to freeze to death but dressing in wintry clothes is depressing on a summer holiday.
Jane, by email

What to do? Jane, it seems to me that you – as so many correspondents to this column do – answered your own query in the letter. Yes, dressing in wintry clothes on a summer break is depressing. But you know what is even more depressing? Freezing to death.

Look, you would probably get a different answer if you wrote to one of the myriad British journalists around, but I'm going to give you some straight talkin' American advice here. There are many things I love about Britain: the national obsession with chocolate; the existence of Speaker's Corner; the fact that newspapers run front page stories about the health of the Queen's corgis.

But one thing I do not love and will never understand is the sense of pride some Britons take in being deliberately uncomfortable. You know, the ones who swim in the sea in November in the rain. The ones who insist on going on walks in lashing storms. The ones who seem to think they're residing on some kind of moral high ground by not turning on the heat until December, when all they're really residing on is a pile of their own smugness, which is all they have to heat their frostbitten bones.

I fully concur that Americans tend to take the whole "personal comfort" thing too far, with their overheated apartments and icy cold air conditioners, their giant cars that they drive 50 yards to go to the gym, and their insanely large portions of food. But really, there is a middle way, and seeing as "middle way" goes against every grain of American ethos (over there you're either a raging Muslim socialist or a swivel-eyed rightwing shock jock), then it is up to modern Brits such as yourself, Jane, to find it. There is nothing superior about making yourself uncomfortable. Rather, it is the person who feels genuinely at ease who should be the most commended, and that person is living in neither an unheated nor an overheated house.



Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/fashion/2013/may/27/what-wear-british-summer-holiday