Yet again I’d forgotten just how I struggle in February, the cold and dark, drear and downcast. Each year I’m shocked and bewildered and appalled by the cloak of despair that drops around my shoulders. Surviving it takes such an enormous amount of energy, there’s hardly anything left for the good stuff.
This year, though, it was different. The sunshine broke through clear and often, dazzling with its brightness. If anticipation is nine-tenths of the pleasure, you’re probably not doing it right - but there’s certainly something to be said for having something nice to look forward to.
When the alarm goes off - always too early whatever the time - and I’m running through the day’s schedule in my head, I love that drowsy realisation that something good is coming up.
There are lots of ways of counting down towards a nice time. Hours and minutes, obviously. Days, weeks and months, years even. I’ve also counted in miles, pay-packets, the distance between cigarettes and even for a while the blissful pauses between the agony of one breast-feed and the next (thank god that’s one thing at least I won’t have to do ever again).
Lately it’s all changed. I’m not lurching from one something-to-look-forward-to to the next one any more. An end now to this one-more-day-until-coffee-with-a-friend, two-weeks-until-my-facial, three-months-to-the-holiday: good days are easy to find now. Barely a week is going by without a day that makes me feel great, barely a day goes by without a reason to smile.
Winter can be a dark, cold, lonely time - or so it’s always been for me. But the sun was always there behind the clouds this year, glinting through so much more easily than I thought it ever could.
There has been a change in the weather for me these last months, and that feeling of crackling with anticipation, sparkling with excitement, is one I’m happy to experience.
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