6 London stereotypes you always see in summer

Through savvy manipulation of the holiday calendar, this colleague will not be working another five-day week until September. Mostly it’s long weekends — Lisbon, Cornwall, Barcelona — and then one proper holiday (Tuscany in August), which they have managed to time over the bank holiday, so they’re away for 10 days off the back of five days of leave allowance. Naturally, you are incensed that you didn’t think of it yourself. The Inbetweener’s disposition is detached: if they bother to speak in a meeting, they have the faraway tone of someone who knows that this will never, ever be their problem. Meanwhile, you’re spending at least half a day every week fielding the emails now rerouted to your inbox by their evasive out-of-office in which they call holiday ‘annual leave’ — a passive aggressive turn of phrase that has the faint whiff of contractual entitlement, unlike ‘holiday’, which just sounds like fun. When the Inbetweener is (physically) in the office, they perform at a glacial pace, spend a lot of time on the Mr & Mrs Smith website, and invariably book a train or flight that leaves at 5pm on a Friday, meaning they’re ‘shooting out’ of the office at around 2pm. They never book the afternoon off as ‘annual leave’. It bothers you that this bothers you.

The Glastonbore

More than a month later, they still won’t talk of anything other than the Pyramid Stage and have already clicked ‘attending’ to ‘Glastonbury 2019’ on Facebook — an event that is literally taking place in two years’ time. In the weeks following their return, they endured a very public state of mourning. ‘Take me back’ is a regular refrain; while later, a GlastHUNbury album — a title so visionary and singular that four people on your newsfeed also thought of it — is uploaded. They were there for Corbyn, obviously; it felt like a cultural water-cooler moment, definitely. It was better than Radiohead, no question. They’re still wearing the copper bangle they wrought, by their own hand, at a small stall in Green Futures; months after the sun set on the Pyramid Stage, they’re still talking about Stormzy’s Other Stage set (‘seminal’). Just ask them to name one of his songs.

The Full-Throttler

It’s 3.30pm on a Friday and the Full-Throttler is, quite literally, twitching. This — otherwise known as their contracted working hours — is eating into drinking time. They are, clearly, on Facebook instead of Outlook (you can see their screen) and every few minutes they pick up their phone and start tapping at high velocity, and laughing. They look up to ensure that everyone on the desk bank has heard them. In summer, every evening’s fair game: a licence for full throttle hedonism that starts with frosé on a rooftop somewhere in the City and migrates to a more grimy terraced bar in Peckham until the wee hours. You imagine that being one of their mates is probably a laugh, but being one of their colleagues is like living in an unremitting Groundhog Day, where the pedestrian plot centres on the symptoms of a white wine hangover. Once you actually saw them wearing sunglasses at their desk. They also take an hour and a half for lunch every day and by the end of the summer, you want to throttle them. Worse, you’re also a little bit jealous. A little.

The Wedding Warrior

Somehow, this colleague is attending a wedding or hen/stag do every weekend of the summer. You have been to a wedding once. ‘Just wait a few years,’ the Wedding Warrior is saying, hushed, cautionary, their eyes narrowed. ‘This will be you in a few years.’ On Wednesday afternoons, as the weekend moves into sight, they start talking about this weekend’s planned rigmarole. Hen dos inevitably involve a trip to Amsterdam: it’s costing more than £500 and they’re sharing a room with a girl they’ve never met but who was BFFs with the bride at boarding school. After listening to the Wedding Warrior grouse about everything from the hotel’s booking system to the departure airport (‘Stansted is all the way in Essex’), you feel very sorry for the bride in question. The actual wedding usually involves an English county outside London’s orbit — which means renting a car and driving down on Friday afternoon after work. They’ll hit the traffic going out of London and probably won’t arrive at the B&B until after 1am, and then they have to be up at 8.30 to start getting ready for the wedding breakfast. And it’s not cheap, you know. Though you note they have managed to muster a new outfit for every single Facebook album that inevitably appears the week after the event. At the end of the season, they announce that they are getting married next summer. Revenge.

The Holiday Martyr

They’re not going away this year. No, not this summer. Maybe a little long weekend in October in a drizzly part of Scotland — if they can get a Friday off. But not a proper summer holiday. You know this because the Holiday Martyr has been talking about it, most weeks, since April. They wear the wounded moue of the perennial victim: when you offer condolences, they manage a stoic smile. It’s okay, they say; the whole team can’t be away at once. At least it’s quiet in here over the summer, as everyone else is off enjoying themselves. Tired of their exaggerated suffering, you examine the holiday calendar and discover that there are two wide open weeks in July.

Illustrations by Lauren Radley