Today friends, if you haven't already heard, is the longest day of the summer. Or, as I like to call it, the gateway to hell.

Melodramatic? Yes. But summer does nothing for me. Hate it. Despise it. It reduces me to a twelve year old girl, hurling clothes around my bedroom in an 8am frenzy, trying to find something that covers my limbs (isn't that the point of clothes?), but can also withstand suffocating tube carriage heat. These sort of clothes don't exist. I've checked. 

Summer clothes have consistently failed me. I've got boobs so I can't do those lovely, flimsy spaghetti strap things that look like a handkerchief on a couple of bits of string.  And I refuse to wear sensible, thick-strapped matronly vests that make me look like Onslo from Keeping Up Appearances. Maxi dresses make me look pregnant. I know what looks good on my Celtic pallor, and it isn't blush pink, massive tablecloth print dresses or (shudder) neon. I am a woman who needs navy, black, white and more black. A classic, flattering palette that is in joyous abundance during winter - my spirit season - but fritters away like a Solero on a window sill in the summertime. 

"The only thing more annoying than the gaping chasm of summer outfit options is the growing pack of smug summer disciples"

The only thing more annoying than the gaping chasm of summer outfit options is the growing pack of smug summer disciples. You know the ones. They say things like  'oh, I LOVE summer. I'm such a summer girl.' Yes, of course you are. You're most likely ten feet tall, Amazonian, with beautiful olive skin that doesn't repel the sun. Your natural habitat is inside a few triangles of lycra, guffawing about in the surf. 

But what of the summer deniers, like me? Because of boho, we all sort of got away with pretending to be into summer a few years ago - we all wanted to wear floaty prairie dresses, broderie anglaise everything and flippy cheesecloth skirts. But those days are long gone. Navigating summer dressing in 2013 is a fractured, complex, intimidating beast. White, minimalist tailoring is a spillage-disaster to waiting to happen. Hippie, embroidered Navaho-like pieces make me look like a shamanic vegan. And, as mentioned, print is too jolly and shouty to even consider. So, in some sort of cantekerous defiance, I refuse. I wear jackets, t-shirts, proper shoes and socks and heavy denim jeans.

And anyway, no amount of of summer tat can compete with the form-fitting, timelessness of a Burberry trench coat or a Church's Chelsea boot. Would you ever see Diane Keaton in a paint-splattered floral tea dress? I doubt it. 

However you play it, chances are you're going to have to get your legs out, something that for me, takes a certain amount of prep that my time can't afford. After de-hairing, exfoliating, moisturising and smearing on leg make-up (MAC Face and Body Foundation, £20.50 I thank you), I've lost the will to live. And there's the possibility of sweating, who has time to deal with this? Not forgetting the hourly reapplication of mattifying face powder, to take down the blinding shine that bounces off my forehead. 

It's quite an ostracizing admission, hating summer. It's generally met with faces bulging with affected sympathy, like 'oh, you poor little goth, how sad that you are unable to enjoy the season that has enabled me to wear batty-riders to work.' Thing is, I'm not a goth, not really. And I'm not utterly insane, the beauty of a clear blue sky is not lost on me. I'm just a girl who likes a good coat, waiting for her time.