Tomorrow is, thank goodness, the shortest day and the start of the longest night. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s officially the start of winter, at least astronomically. For me, winter started at the beginning of October and ends on the last day of February. Autumn for me simply doesn’t exist.
These dark days are depressing, though: literally. Seasonally adjusted disorder, or SAD as we call it, is one of the few (it seems) mental conditions with which I have not been diagnosed but I suspect it is only a matter of time! The long dark nights and the short dark days can really grind you down if you let them, or if you can’t stop letting them grind you down.
It is at times like these when I can see the benefits of hibernating, like my old tortoise used to do, slumbering peacefully for months on end whilst I slogged my way to school on all weathers (this was long before the time when everyone gets a lift to work in their parents’ cars).
The winter solstice is, literally, a light at the end of the tunnel. We may not, at first notice the gradual change to lighter evenings, not least to the idiotic decision to change our clocks every year to ensure our days are as short as possible. We’re usually peering through the gloom by 4.00 pm on a bright day and it’s pitch dark shortly afterwards. If the clocks didn’t change, it would be light to at least 4.30 pm on a good day. Surely that’s better?
I would go even further and change our clocks in a different way. I’d have summer time in our winter and double summer time in the summer, if you follow my drift. Not to satisfy any EU bureaucrat but to give us longer evenings.
My first move as Britain’s next prime minister will be to introduce these time changes and in the coming weeks I shall unveil the rest of my manifesto to make our country a brighter and less depressed place. I don’t think I have a dream but I have a few policies that make us all feel better, especially in winter.
