Love Sunshine

Carping daily

Seize the day exhorts the poet-philosopher, but how can you when every day slips sloppily from your grasp and plops into a puddle of lost Time?

It may seem absurd to carp on about lost sunshine - and, believe me, I'm heartily sick of the sound of my own voice on this one, and would dearly like to put some of the love back in this blog - but sunshine is merely the symbol, life is the substance here. The sun marks our days, or would do if we could see it. The absence of the sun in what is supposed to be summer more truly reveals us to be mere walking shadows than if we could actually see them striding to meet us in the mornings and evading us come nightfall. There is more than fear in a handful of mud. It's fine for those philosophers, loafing around under the blue skies of Greece or Rome, to establish such principles. Their days were worth the seizing. Ours are put on hold. Life is what slips by as we are waiting for the weather to improve.

It'll clear up next week. No it won't. Next month will be better, so they lie. And before we know it, it's gone. The shops are already putting out their Christmas decorations, like so many nails in the coffin of summer. And so we mothball our hopes for another year, losing much more than a chance to wear the clothes we bought in spring. But that's OK, as they won't fit us now. We grow old, we grow old. To avoid the puddles we keep our trousers rolled. Sunshine is life - it is the source of all life -; but it has also become the light source of 'Lifestyle', a seductive package we've all bought into. The ads that will soon be sprinkled with fake snow fantasies of Dickensian delusion, have just finished selling us other desires, a-sparkle with fatuous golden promise to mock our most cherished dreams. Only marketeers believe in seasons in this country. So refuse. Refuse their Christmas. Resist their new season lies until they deliver what they sold us last season. If we can't have summer, then we shouldn't have to endure Christmas. Do so, and we might just resist Time itself. And although we can't make our sun stand still, or even visit us, yet we can make him run*.

*Robert Mighall, 41 years old, single, overworked and under-sunned is not having a good time of it. He apologises to the estate of T.S. Eliot, the shades of Andrew Marvell, Shakespeare, et al, the English language and the blogosphere, his long suffering mother, the weather men and the climate who mean him no personal ill; and finally his neighbours below, tormented by his demented tread and mournful wail, and ever-vigilant for the kick of a chair and the judder of a rope.