All the words for summer seem beautiful, but the most beautiful to me is the Greek word kalokairi. Not just beautiful but profound: kalokairi comes from two Greek words meaning fine or beautiful (kalos) and time or moment (kairos). Now "fine time" might not seem an especially insightful formulation for summer, but you need to remember that kairos is not just any old time. Kairos is the proper time, the unique, unrepeatable, propitious moment, as opposed to chronos, that other, deadly kind of time which grinds on relentlessly, linear, unstoppable, consuming all things. Being Greek words, they are also gods: Kairos a kind of trickster, and Chronos a wise old greybeard.

The word kalokairi beautifully and profoundly reminds us of the paradox of time, especially in relation to summer. We know, especially as we get older, especially if we live in latitudes higher or lower than, say, the 45th parallel, that summer does not last long (or in Shakespeare's image: "Summer's lease hath all too short a date"). But at the same time, summer can seem, especially to children, endless. Can anyone forget how they felt as a child of 10 at the start of the summer holidays: golden, lazy, full-leafed days stretching on for eight or 10 weeks, which to a child is an eternity?