The Winter Depression

I know quite a few people who get quite uptight when weather doesn't correlate with the current season. For the last 17 summers I've listened to people moan about the 'Great British Summer', and all it's rain, and it's only 17 because I have no consciousness of those before. I've always been pretty passive about the weather. I don't mind the showers in the middle of July. It's funny to watch tourists look up at the sky and curse as their beige cargo shorts get drenched in the freak rainfall.

In the middle of Summer, I'm quite happy to stay indoors and admire the amazing weather from a safe place, such as my bed. Sunshine is over rated anyway. At least rain doesn't burn your skin, sting your eyes and feel like it's melting your legs. If anything it cleans you (unless of course it rains continuously and the resulting downpour culminates in sea levels rising so high that they will wipe out our tiny little existence. It's not so good then). Well done rain.

In the height of those heat-waves, I always find that it's much easier to be too cold as opposed to being too hot. It's far easier to light a wood burner than sit in a fridge. It's also much easier to keep putting clothes on, on the other hand, if you're still hot when you get down to your bare skin, you're pretty darn stuck.

Throughout all of summer, I will happily stand by the opinions featured in the above paragraphs. At least until we reach the end of British Summer Time - then everything changes.

Whoever came up with the idea of Daylight Saving Time was a lazy little bell-end. It only feels like a good idea when you emerge from your sleep feeling like you've cheated time itself by getting an extra hour in bed. For me, that hour was pointless, mainly because when I know the clocks are going back, I feel justified to stay up an hour later than I usually would. But if you have had your little lie in, Daylight Saving Time ceases to be a good idea as soon as your feet touch the ground in the morning.

For me, the sheer gravity of the situation, like many others, hits me when I get in the shower and actually wake up a bit. I think to myself "It's quite bright this morning actually...oh yeah...that means it's going to be dark by 5.30 though. That is early." That initial thought snowballed in my head until this evening, when I drove home from work to find it was dark. I thought I didn't like the sunlight glaring in my eyes through the summer, but car lights coming towards you on country roads in the dark are infinitely worse.

At least the extremely heavy blow of the prospect of another Winter is softened by the thoughts of Christmas. Maybe the entire reason Christmas adverts appear so early is to remind us that we don't need to spend our evenings curled up in duvets, crying until our tear drops freeze. No, we can spend them feeling merry and giving each other presents, that is until January, at which point we are all very much on our own until that heroic weekend in March, and from then I will never moan about sunshine ever again. Promise.