1845: Bleak House

I've been "up and down" mental health-wise all week. This evening is one of those occasions where I'm feeling a little bit bleak. I shan't go into the reasons, as they're not really important and don't really concern me directly for the most part, but it strikes me that at the moment, things seem to be a bit shit for quite a few people, if the timelines of people I follow on social media are anything to go by.

February is regarded by some as one of the more depressing months. It's the very heart of winter — it's bitterly cold outside at the moment, even more so with the windchill, though of course it's nothing compared to something like a Canadian winter — and there's not a whole lot of anything going on. Christmas is over, New Year's is over and the only vaguely celebratory occasion people have to look forward to in the immediate future is Valentine's Day, and even that isn't universally loved: I don't mind admitting that in my single days, Valentine's Day was an occasion where I pretty much wanted to hide under the covers lamenting the fact that I'd probably never find anyone willing to put on the sort of saucy lingerie that tends to get advertised around this time of year and then [CENSORED]. (Thankfully, given that Andie and I got together around Valentine's Day, I now associate it with positive things in general, not just saucy lingerie and boffing. But I, as ever, digress.)

There was some sort of half-hearted "mental health awareness" thing at my place of work this week, but no-one really engaged with it, despite the fact that I suspect a few people might have benefited from the opportunity to be completely open and honest about a few things. The trouble with marking off a period like that specifically for Let's Talk About Feeling Suicidal!! (or similar topics) is that the people who genuinely do want to talk about this sort of thing but don't know quite how to go about it end up feeling somewhat pressured and consequently say nothing; meanwhile, the people who know nothing about depression, anxiety and all those other wonderful things the human mind does to fuck us up just sort of sit around uncomfortably saying things like "So…" and "Anyway…" until everyone just gives up on the whole thing.

There are quite a few contributing factors to how I'm feeling right now; as I say, I won't bore you with all of them, but one thing I will talk about a little is the feeling of isolation. Feeling like you're alone in the world is a horrible thing, and while I'm lucky enough to have Andie around all the time, there are still periods when I feel very cut off from people that I like, love and care about. And this feeds into a vicious cycle where it gets harder and harder to interact, and you start worrying about bothering people too much, even though you desperately want to see them, to talk to them, to just be with them. It kind of sucks. And that's kind of where I am right now.

Still, sitting around in self-loathing isn't going to help matters at all. It's Friday night, so I should be relaxing. So I'm off to do just that. Have a pleasant weekend, dear reader.

1769: Knackered

Page_1 To be perfectly frank with you, dear reader, I'm not at all sure what I should write about today, so I've come to the oft-reached conclusion that I should just start typing and see what spews forth from my brain onto the page, like a violent eruption of creative vomit into the toilet of online publication.

I'm tired. I may have had Monday off from work thanks to our holiday, but it's still been a long week. It hasn't been the best week either, frankly, not because of any real specific happenings, but just from a mental health perspective. I don't know whether it's a sort of "comedown" from the nice time we had away or if it's something a bit more deep-seated, but I've been feeling thoroughly miserable this week for a variety of reasons, which has probably been pretty clear from at least a couple of my recent posts.

Still, no matter, I guess, because the weekend is here, and that's time to rest, relax, recharge and… something else beginning with R. (No, not that. Honestly.) Andie is away for most of tomorrow for a friend's birthday party celebration drinks type thing, so I'm taking the rare opportunity to go spend some time with one of my local friends (and regular board gaming buddies) at the weekend. We're going to play some Wii U and possibly some board games, and he's going to experiment with cooking things that sound far too ambitious but which will hopefully be tasty if they come out all right.

We shall see, I guess.

The onset of winter isn't helping with the whole "feeling a bit low" thing. It's got to that point in the year where it's dark when I leave the house in the morning, and by the time I get out of work it's dark, too, making me feel like I live in perpetual night-time. (The fact my office doesn't have a whole lot of natural light going on doesn't help, either, and hours of fluorescent lights and computer screens every day isn't particularly restful on the eyes. It's no surprise that I feel like I need some new glasses, but after the opticians I went to last got my prescription wrong not once but twice I've been hesitant to waste more time on eye tests and getting glasses made.)

It's cold, too. Not cold enough for snow and ice, thankfully — there's only been one morning so far where I've had to chip frost off my car, though naturally this occurred before I'd actually remembered to purchase an ice-scraper — but still uncomfortably chilly. We have at least figured out both how to turn on the gas fire in our living room (which I'm still convinced works through black magic, since the stuff in it looks like it's burning but actually isn't) and how to turn on the heating in the rest of our house using the old-ass combination of dodgy thermostat and rattly electric timer. We thought for a while that the heating wasn't working, but — my Grandad would be proud of me — a bit of wiggling the valve thing in the airing cupboard seemed to make it start working again without too much difficulty. That saved an expensive call to a heating engineer, anyway.

So that's been my day and my week, then. Quite looking forward to tomorrow, it should be fun to get out of the house and do some stuff for a while. As of right now, though, I feel very much like curling up in bed with my Vita is the right thing to do, so I think that's what I'm going to go and do.

1758: Those Winter Nights

I'm beginning to think that there's not really any part of the year that is what I'd call "ideal" conditions in this country. The summer months are far too hot, and the winter months we're moving into now are far too cold, wet, windy and just generally irritating.

There's a special kind of unpleasantness about winter, though. As I sit here typing this, the weather outside can probably be best described as sounding "hostile". The wind is blowing, picking up and howling through the streets and alleyways; the rain is falling, drenching everything and turning anything that isn't concreted over into a swampy mire of brown gunge; there's a draught coming in from somewhere around the window that I haven't managed to identify as yet.

Not only that, but we're at that time of year where, assuming you go out to work, you're probably leaving your house when it's dark and not getting back until it's dark either. All in all, it's a fairly bleak time of the year, and it's unsurprising that it puts some people in dark moods.

I'm not sure what changed my outlook. When I was young, I used to quite like winter. I used to enjoy the early darkness and the necessity to carry a torch around — I must confess I still do have an odd liking for wielding a torch, even if it's only an improvised one using my phone's flash — and I used to like wrapping up in layers to be immune to the waves of cold in the air. I used to enjoy the run-up to the Christmas period, complete with village carol singing and the inevitability of being invited in for brandy and mince pies at least once or twice during our nightly tours of the mean streets of Great Gransden. I never used to really notice the bleakness.

So what changed? I wonder. Perhaps it's just the fact that my life is very different to how it was when I was younger; the fact that now, rather than living the carefree life of a child, I have my own responsibilities and anxieties to worry about, including the necessity of getting up and going out — often in horrible weather — to get to work on time, then getting home in often equally horrible weather only to slump down, pretty tired out and not really desirous of doing anything other than something that doesn't require a huge amount of mental activity.

Perhaps I'm just not quite in the rhythm of the full-time job set just yet. I've been doing pretty well, though; I've managed to maintain my routine of getting up earlier than I was, leaving earlier than I was and usually missing the bulk of the traffic of a morning and sometimes in the evening too. This puts me in a somewhat more positive frame of mind, even if the weather is as hostile as it sounds like it is as I type this. There's still that ever-present feeling of tiredness, of slogging on towards some as-yet unknown destination. But that's just how life works for the vast majority of the population; I should probably get used to it.

I have an away-day for work tomorrow. Not really relishing the prospect of having to stay overnight, but at least the accommodation is paid for (albeit in boardings described by one reviewer on TripAdvisor as "like a prison camp, only dirtier") and we're getting fed. And then at the end of this week Andie and I are taking a short break at Center Parcs over in Longleat for her birthday treat. I'm looking forward to that, so I guess there's the objective for this week, if nothing else.

On that note, then, it's time to wrap up warm, snuggle down under the duvet and get some sleep for a horrendously even-earlier-than-the-new-usual start tomorrow morning. Expect a grumpy post from my phone tomorrow evening, and the comics will be back the day after assuming I don't just collapse from exhaustion the moment I get back in.

#oneaday, Day 317: Snow Joke

First up: DO YOU SEE WHAT I DID WITH THE TITLE IT'S CLEVER AND FUNNY AND BUGGROFF

Ahem. Anyway. It has been snowing. It being winter, it thankfully hasn't caused anywhere near as much panic as the last time it snowed, when it was headline news pretty much 24/7. Granted, it did snow quite a lot, though I got the impression that Canada and Scandinavia and, err, other places it snows a lot were laughing at us quite a bit for our complete incapability to deal with a bit of the white stuff.

Snow is a mixed bag. Some people love it, others hate it. As with most things, though, there are good and bad things to it.

Bad: cold.

Good: pretty.

Bad: wet.

Good: inspires creativity.

Bad: receiving a snowball.

Good: sending a snowball.

Bad: walking when dressed inappropriately.

Good: walking when dressed appropriately.

Bad: driving.

Good: not being able to drive and getting a day off work.

You get the picture.

It actually snows here in the UK—at least in places where I've been living—rather less than you might think, with whole years going by sometimes without a trace of the cold stuff. Even so, it always astonishes me quite how surprised people seem to be when there is even the slightest bit of snowfall. It inspires panic buying and the importing of grit. Grit! The stuff you find on the ground. Yeah. Ridiculous.

I just went out for a run in the snow. It's cold, snowy and icy. It is also difficult to run in, though I found that after about ten minutes or so, I didn't feel it any more. This was perhaps due in part to the number of layers I was wearing (which probably also contributed to my relatively slow speed tonight) but also due to actually being active. Or perhaps I was just so frostbitten all my extremities had fallen off.

I have one particularly enduring memory of the snow from my childhood: out in the garden with my brother and some of his friends, carving a lovingly-crafted likeness of Arnie from snow. This lovingly-crafted likeness of Arnie was wearing a jock strap which was lovingly carved with a little bit too much care and attention, as I recall, but the finished product looked awesome. There are probably some photos floating around somewhere, but this was the days long before the Internet, let alone Facebook, so you won't find those pictures anywhere online.

Most recently, my experiences with snow have been negative. Driving in the snow is particularly unpleasant. I recall one night I was driving home from the school I worked at at the time—a trip which normally took about 50 minutes—and it took six hours. Six hours. At least one of those hours was spent in a genuinely terrifying position halfway up a steep hill with traffic in front and behind, praying to God that my brakes worked properly.

Right now, though, I can look out of the window at the thin white covering on the street and admire its pleasantness. All the more so having just been out in it.

Doesn't stop it being bloody freezing even inside, though. Wrap up warm.

'Tis the season to be miserable

So what's the deal with winter anyway?

Trite opening I know but it bears some discussion. Exactly what is it about those winter months that makes an already-curmudgeonly old git like myself into a regular Sad Sack? I refuse to believe there's not an answer beyond "it's cold" because I'm not the only one it happens to.

Case study number one: my very good friend, who we'll just call "E" in case she minds being used as a case study, cited the example to me that every bad breakup she's ever had took place in the month of December, almost without fail. Is this a symptom of the winter blues or just a coincidence? Whatever it is, it's made her just as distrustful of the month of Our Lord's birth than I am.

Who knows. All I know is that it's dark in the morning when I go to work, often dark in the evening when I return. The general public are in that irritatingly frenzied state of "panic buying" – because some people still aren't aware that most shops are shut on Christmas Day after all – and all those little annoyances about the general public that you already notice more than the average man in the street when you work in retail suddenly become ten to fifteen times worse. (I have no scientific basis for quoting that figure, I just thought I'd channel the arseholes who come up with make-up "fake science" adverts for a moment – they're gone now, don't worry.)

Last year I had the most miserable Christmas of my life. My wife-to-be had departed for Bolton to spend Christmas with her family (duty calls and all that) and I was scheduled to work.

But I had 'flu (and don't even get me started on that "man flu" bollocks that is such an unfunny running joke in this country), so I was confined to bed, unable even to go to work and spend time with the few buddies who were still here. Nope, instead I lay in bed on Christmas Day until about 3pm, only rising to make a Beechams Hot Lemon drink when the banging headaches and joint pains were getting a bit much.

I know there's people out there who have far more miserable Christmases than that, but this is my rant and god-dammit if I'm not going to be a bit selfish! (I also hate how political correctness dictates the necessity of a paragraph like this one, but that's another post all of its own)

Anyway. This Christmas is fortunately shaping up to be a lot better, as my now-wife Jane and I are spending our first Christmas on our own as a married couple.

It's not that I don't like spending time with people, you understand.

Actually, that's a lie. It's EXACTLY that I don't like spending time with people. Especially stressed-out people which, it often seems to me, is becoming more and more a part of the holiday season. The clue's in the name, people! A holiday should be a break, not an excuse to panic over a fat-ass turkey and whether or not you've got enough bloody vol-au-vents to feed Uncle Boggart.

Breathe.

So, there you have it.

I hope you, if you're reading this, have a better experience in the wintertime than either I or several of my friends have had or, in some cases, are having.

And if you do have friends who are having a tough winter, give them a hug. Sometimes it's all you need to let someone know you care, and it immediately makes things feel that much better.

I know, I'm a big girl, but I don't care.

Merry Christmas.

HUMBUG!!!