For those of us who live in the UK, summer is an elusive thing. We pass the dark winter and chilly spring looking toward the dog days with hope and excitement, making plans for weekends away, music festivals, picnics on a lawn or hillside, long lunches with friends. We pass the damp autumn and cold winter wistfully regretting their passing with nostalgia and, quite often, a sense of regret at opportunities squandered. The few brief days the season does offer are hardly enough to give us the chance to complain about the heat, the flies, the inability to sleep, or the fact that they will soon be over. 

What better way to preserve those memories with a photograph? By snapping away we can, surely, hold on to such fleeting pleasures, and comfort ourselves with them through the bleaker months. 

Though, I imagine, the summers are rather different in Catalonia, this is the idea that Catalan writer Quim Monzó puts forward in ‘The Fullness of Summer.’ An extended family meet for their summer reunion, and the men in the group, cameras in hand, insist on preserving each and every moment. The long lunch and the day itself ends with everyone so busy preparing and posing, that they have scarcely noticed it took place at all. Like an English summer, the story is incredibly brief, and ends almost as soon as it has begun.

Published in English in A Thousand Morons, Open Letter, 2012 and The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories, Penguin Classics, 2021) – picked by CD Rose. Rose is the author of The Blind Accordionist and Who’s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else and the editor of The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure (all published by Melville House). You can read his individual Personal Anthology and other occasional selections here.