I am writing on what is known as Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year. Or so the Daily Mail tells me. The newspaper claims that Blue Monday was invented by a psychologist called Cliff Arnall, who seven years ago identified the third Monday in January as the day on which people are at their gloomiest. ‘He came up with a scientific formula based on the length of time until next Christmas, holiday debt, and the likelihood of giving up New Year resolutions,’ it says. The remoteness of next Christmas might seem, on the contrary, to be something to cheer about; and failure to keep New Year resolutions could have been easily avoided by following my example and not making any, as could ‘holiday debt’ by following the example of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge. But this nonsensical anniversary survives, like so many artificial occasions (Father’s Day springs to mind), because of its propensity to make money for somebody.
You might not think that the year’s gloomiest day would be a spur to extravagance, but Mr Arnall published his findings on a television travel channel, provoking suspicion that one purpose was to boost the travel industry by getting people to jet off to happier places in sunnier climes. But with so many flights cancelled because of the weather, any attempt to escape Britain by air this year would have made Blue Monday even more depressing than usual. And Mr Arnall himself, who comes from Brecon in Wales, now confesses that the idea of a single most depressing day is ‘not particularly helpful’ because it could become ‘a self-fulfilling prophecy’. The weather may be dark and cold; the cost of fuel may be more than many can afford; thousands may be facing redundancy; and most may be feeling unmotivated and yearning to hibernate. But that’s no reason to make Blue Monday a justification for self-pity.
Nevertheless, there is always someone ready to squeeze any occasion for its remunerative possibilities, and Blue Monday has now been used as a pretext by a chocolate company called Beyond Dark to commission a study of what things give people the most pleasure. Surprise, surprise! ‘Eating chocolate’ comes high on the list, though (at 65 per cent) it is in third place after ‘playing with puppies’ (67.5 per cent) and far below the nation’s number one most pleasurable thing, which is ‘finding a ten-pound note’ (82.9 per cent). Still, eating chocolate is much preferred to ‘looking at pictures of smiling babies’ (50.9 per cent), which I can quite understand, because looking at pictures of smiling babies probably means pictures of other people’s babies, for one’s own babies, which are obviously far more interesting, would normally be available, like puppies, to play with in person. The huge enthusiasm for finding ten-pound notes seems odd when anyone might win millions of pounds on the National Lottery, but the authors of this ludicrous study didn’t presumably offer this as an option.
I have never really thought what my own favourite things might be, but they don’t include any of the above, nor any of the ones listed in the famous song from The Sound of Music (‘Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens’, etc.). In particular, ‘silver white winters that melt into springs’ suggest the present freeze to be followed by floods, which is not a pleasurable thought at all. My own Blue Monday hasn’t been too depressing so far, because pleasure often comes from things turning out less bad than you expect. My ducks were all still alive this morning, despite the ice on their pond making them vulnerable to foxes, and the chickens had laid three eggs, despite the freezing cold. I drove my elder brother into Towcester to see his chiropodist, and the roads were clear of snow and ice, the traffic almost non-existent, and the appointment with the chiropodist of mercifully short duration. Such things cheer one up much more than any number of whiskers on kittens.
And another thing that cheers me up is that, far from failing in a New Year resolution, I have triumphantly succeeded in doing without cigarettes for four years, having given up smoking on 20 January 2009, the day of Barack Obama’s first inauguration as President of the United States. It may be a bad Blue Monday for some: for Pippa Middleton, whose publishers are hesitating to publish more books by her on entertaining after poor sales of the first; for Anna Wintour, whose hopes of becoming US ambassador to London have reportedly been dashed. But it’s quite a good day for Obama, enjoying a second inauguration, and for me.
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