Forgetting the Sun

　

 

I can just about withstand the UK winter, particularly with my trusty old SAD lamp, and have done so for 19 years. But I can't withstand many bad summers, of which there have been far more than our fair share. The problem with a bad summer is that you know you still have to get through winter, untopped up with Vitamin D, pale as the moon, with lower than normal serotonin levels. And then there is no guarantee that the summer following the winter will be any better, either. And then there's another winter after that.

This year we have had a good summer, and the difference is remarkable, in everyone's mood, in the number of referrals we have at work for people in distress, in the children I treat at schools. I am ready for this winter, even if, like several we've had in recent years, it is grim, and snow-choked, and endless. My husband thinks I am obsessed with the weather. It doesn't affect him at all, and, being a northerner, he is well-used to the dark and the cold. The point is, I wasn't obsessed until I came to live here. Now I completely understand why people in this country go abroad purely for the sun, and nothing else. I used to laugh at them. I stopped laughing after about my third summer here.

There is a wonderful section in the book 'Apple Tree Yard' by Louise Doughty, about the British weather, which I will quote here in full:  'The quality of blue that the sky has in May is quite unlike the quality it has at other times of the year.  Summer throws everything it's got at us then, as if to remind us what it's all about: dense blue, impenetrable.  June is more confused: muddled skies, showers.  In June we are reminded, yes, the British summer, this is what it's like.  It's rubbish, really . Why do we live on this damp island?  July is unpredictable: it does it on purpose.  It likes to let us know it could go either way, depending on its mood.  Most of the time we are philosophical, but every now and then, the odd blasting hot day arrives to give us a bit of false hope.  In August, a kind of collective stalwartness sets in.  Rain lashes down on the Bank Holiday, but we are British, we can handle it.  We never expected any different.  The false hopes of July, the muddles skies of June, even the blank blue of May - none of it had us fooled, not for one minute.'

 

Years of one bad season after another, months on end of not seeing the sun, and you forget that it is still there. Oh sure, you know it is, intellectually, but some deep, primal part of yourself no longer quite believes it.
 

Life can be like that. You can forget, lose awareness of the light within yourself and within others, of the life in every thing. You know it is there, because you kind of believe it, but you've lost the feeling, the conviction, the sensation, the experience of it. It becomes just an intellectual exercise. Some would say that it is at that point you need faith in its purest form, not based on any 'evidence' that you can find. Well, if that's the case, then my faith is sometimes seriously lacking. But it is a good point. To trust in something you can't see, feel, or touch, and know that it will get better; the tide will turn, the darkness will lift, the sun will return. One day.
 

My story Rain is about the different effects the weather has on people, and what might happen if it rained non-stop for nineteen years. It is a story of gritted teeth, and despair, and humour - and hope.