You can take the pulse of a day pretty quickly by looking at Twitter at any given point. Looking in the morning generally gives you an idea of how people are going to treat the rest of the day. On a Monday, there’s generally a lot of bitching about going back to work, about the weekend not being long enough, about getting up early, that sort of thing.

This morning looked like it was going to be a particular humdinger of a Monday, with everyone seemingly convinced it was the “most depressing day of the year” for some inexplicable reason. Despite the grey, miserable skies and the light “I can’t be arsed to rain properly” drizzle falling outside, it didn’t feel any more depressing than usual. (Hah! He says.) It just seemed like a fairly typical day in good old Blighty, the kind that Bill Bailey describes as being “one of the days that infuses us as a nation with a kind of wistful melancholy”. He’s entirely right. No-one likes grey, miserable days, but this day was no more grey and miserable than any other. In fact, up North, they’d probably just call it “a day”.

I heard the term “Blue Monday” bandied about a bit, so I decided to investigate this terminology in a little more detail using that reliable fountain of collected human wisdom that is Wikipedia.

Blue Monday, says Wikipedia, was a name given to a date supposedly the “most depressing in the year”. It then goes on to add that this was part of a publicity campaign from Sky Travel. Uh-huh. Starting to get the picture here.

But wait! There’s SCIENCE! Specifically, a formula. Here it is:

where weather=W, debt=d, time since Christmas=T, time since failing New Year’s resolutions=Q, low motivational levels=M and the feeling of a need to take action=Na. Neither “D” nor a unit of measurement are defined.

So already we can see that this isn’t the most scientific thing in the world. Supposedly, this nonsensical formula points to the Monday in the last full week of January. Which is not this week, but next week. So even if this theory held any water, today is not Blue Monday.

The fact that the whole thing was part of a marketing campaign is pretty telling, though. Conveniently enough, the supposed “happiest day of the year” has also been calculated as somewhere around midsummer. The source of this “research”? A press release by Wall’s ice cream. Who’d have thought that the happiest day of the year according to an ice cream manufacturer would be a good time to enjoy ice-cream?

Hmm. Apparently today may not be the most depressing day of the year but it is certainly starting to feel like the most cynical day of the year.

It’s the most wonderful time of the yeeeeeear—