Blue Monday...

According to scientists (who probably know these things because they have huge, intelligent brains), today is Blue Monday, the very worst day of the year for everyone. It happens every year, falling on the third Monday.  It's part way through January and the festivities are over, Christmas debt has paralysed all but the solvent few, the weather is pretty much universally bad, the New Year resolutions lie in a tattered heap, VAT's gone up and life really doesn't get shittier than it is today.

I'm not sure that telling us this in print and on television doesn't just compound the issue - isn't it a self-fulfilling prophesy- type scenario, where you get told something bad will happen or is happening and it does? 


However, Blue Monday is, apparently, avoidable and you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps from the very depths of despair, kicking the black dog firmly out of the way by the simple expedient of just being nice. Yes, it's really that easy.  You have to practice but a mere single act of random kindness and Presto!, you feel immediately light, fluffy and full of the joys of incipient Spring, trala.  

Being charitable and helping someone in need - that'll lift your mood better than anything, followed by receiving an unexpected compliment.  If that's not simple enough, listening to the sound of the sea or music should do it, or eating your favourite food or hearing laughter.  Oh. And sitting in the sun, not that that's likely or indeed possible in January, but the idea's nice.  So, I recommend the following: help your stiff old husband up from his chair without being asked and tell him he's quite handsome for an old bloke.  Take a stroll along the prom, whack the stereo up loud enough to shake next door's ornaments off the window ledge and dance like a person demented, stuff yourself full of shepherd's pie and laugh until you wee your pants at the newest bit of scientific research because, really, that's all there is in life that's worth a tuppeny damn - apart from your friends and each other...