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"January brings the snow, makes your feet and fingers glow." So starts the appallingly upbeat poem about the monthly weather by Sara Coleridge. Rubbish. What January brings is rain. Sometimes hail. Maybe sleet. And if there is snow, it won't be the type to make your feet and fingers glow, it'll make your bollocks drop off. Or the female equivalent. (Ovaries fall out? Hmmm... it doesn't have the same ring to it. Nipples stick out? No, entirely the wrong connotation there!) Yes, it's January in England, the absolutely worse month of the year. As I write this I look out of the window and what do I see? Grey skies. It's miserable, damp, nasty, cold and grey. The days may be starting to get longer again, but you would never notice it. |
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And as if the weather weren't enough to have you reaching for the cyanide capsules, January also means the post-Christmas blues. The parties are over, the food is all eaten up, apart from the rotting leftovers in the back of the fridge that even the dog won't touch now, the booze has all gone; it's back to normal and back to work. The January credit card bills roll in, showing the full extent of your reckless spending in the run-up to Christmas. Can you really have spent that much on presents? And surely it didn't cost that much to feed and entertain the one or two Christmas guests, the returning family members, and the friends who just popped in to wish you the felicitations of the season...? So you turn for solace to the newspapers, or perhaps to the TV, and what do you find? They are full of stupid information about stupid diets. No, I don't want to detox my body, thank you very much - I have a liver and some kidneys that have coped perfectly well with flushing unwanted substances out of me all of my life. Yes, I know I ought to lose weight, but following the latest fad by eating nothing but cabbage and avocado soup followed by grapefruit smoothies is not going to work. And no, I am not going to make any resolutions to give up something I know is bad for me, or do more of something boring that I know is good for me. Frankly, when I have the January blues already, trying to "improve my lifestyle" is just guaranteed to fail and that's going to make me feel even worse. January and February really are rotten months. It's mostly the English weather. Did I mention that it's grey? Well it is. Daylight it may be outside, but only barely, and inside it's impossible to function without turning on all the lights. Technically, the sun rose at 8.04am this morning, but you would never have known it, the way it was hiding itself bashfully behind all those thick grey clouds. I'm not saying I suffer from seasonal affective disorder - that's where the lack of sunlight sends you into a deep, deep depression - but the lack of sunlight certainly makes me feel miserable. March, now, that's a good month. It's usually freezing cold in March, with bitter winds keeping the temperature down, but at least the sunshine starts to break through. There's also the first signs of spring: green fuzz appears on branches as the first leaves start to sprout; the early flowers start to poke themselves up out of the ground and open their petals in a riot of colour; birds start to appear every time you are near, and so on. All this is a sign of hope, of life being renewed, of good things to come. But before we get to this point, we have to endure January and February. What I would really like to do is to hibernate for two months - snuggle under my duvet and refuse to come out until the crocuses bloom, surviving only on chocolate. But I guess my cat wouldn't be too happy about that!
This is the first new Diesel's Dump article I have written in... oooh... years! No excuses for the long silence: it's just that I have been busy and have been expending my available creative juices on other things. But now I am back, and I'll try to write some more soon. |
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