I’ve always thought seasonal affective disorder, what with its convenient acronym and all, to be a load of tosh. But that’s because I don’t live with Sad. It’s shamefully easy to dismiss something when you don’t feel it in your own bones. Sad, me? No, I can be grumpy whatever the weather. Also, just as without despair there is no joy, the staggering beauty of a blue sky over the British Isles would be less staggeringly beautiful if it was always there. Blue skies all year round? Nah, not for me.
In fact, I find dismal winter weather somewhat liberating. When the weather’s good, the opportunities it presents are overwhelming. A paralysis of choice takes hold. So many places to go and things to do with the sun on your back. That urgent need to be out there. Every sunny day leaves me with this feeling that I haven’t quite made the most of it. And much as I love my job, being in an office or a studio, I love it a little bit less when the sun is shining outside. In a way, life is more straightforward when it’s grey, windy and wet, as then I can forgive myself for staying at home and being still and calm, essentially doing bugger all for a bit without feeling bad about it.
Still, while winter is fine, spring is finer. Seeing so many people of my acquaintance – especially older people – perk up no end these last couple of weeks, I am now quite sure that Sad is a thing after all. My mum’s a changed woman – and why wouldn’t she be after a long, dark, wet winter sitting in front of the fire watching endless quizshows, cooking contests and Michael Portillo pottering here, there and everywhere? The lifting of the health and spirits of her and those around her is as brightening as any spring flower.
I spoke to Michael Morpurgo regarding the book he’s written about spring. “There’s something about spring that makes you deal with what’s difficult better,” he says. Nicely put. I asked him what writing about it had taught him that hadn’t occurred to him before. “I suppose the thing I’ve learned most is – it sounds rather dreadful – that if you’re really concentrating on spring, you know it might be your last one. You get the wrong side of 80 and that thought does occur to you from time to time.”
It wasn’t his intention to strike any kind of morbid note, but there’s surely something in this. If I throw myself backwards or forwards to last autumn or next, lurking somewhere deep down is the hope that I’ll be around to see the leaves appear back on those trees.
It says something positive about Morpurgo that it’s taken more than 80 springs for this idea to strike him. It’s been on my mind since I was a teenager. I used to look at the horse chestnut tree out the back of our house and fret a little that I’d not see it turn green again. I don’t know what this negativity was all about. I suppose I could put it down to the football team I support, and also to reading more Thomas Hardy than was good for me.
Daft, really. Back then, any bookmaker would have given me short odds indeed on making it safely through to the other side of winter. But perhaps this is the point – year upon year, those odds lengthen. So why wouldn’t the coming of spring be so special? I’ll come back to this idea in the autumn, by which time I hope to have found a way of putting a more positive spin on the falling of the leaves.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
