Well we are well and truly into my bad time of the year and it is little consolation to know that we have already gained half an hour's sunlight from the darkest days of the year.
I know this because I have been keeping watch on the BBC's weather pages. Having set my home town to be Liverpool, I have been accessing the five day weather outlook and keeping tags on the times of sunrise and sunset. In fact, I've been producing a graph in Excel which is entirely the sort of quasi-obsessive project that I am very good at.
Colin informs me that many people are feeling more than usually low this year because of the relatively poor summer last year. The old energy banks are depleted owing to lack of sunshine. It's particularly bad for those people who are affected by Seasonal Affective Disorder. For some of them, even the lightboxes aren't working this year.
Here in the North West I'm noticing darker mornings and a concomitant longer lasting twilight. Over the past few days it has been bright and sharp. The sun blasts into my study from 10:30am as it creeps over the roof of the house opposite. By noon, it also slams into the living room downstairs and warms the ground in the patch of earth I am pleased to call a front garden. Very soon the bulbs that I brought up from Walthamstow which have been placed there will start to show.
Otherwise, it's been a matter of chugging along. Items include fixing bathroom cabinet, the soap dish, the toothbrush holder and the toilet roll dispenser (many thanks for all who offered support for the whole business of drilling through bathroom tiles - I did it and didn't break a single tile), screwing down floorboards, putting up a lucky horse shoe in the back kitchen, putting up my noticeboard and calendar in the kitchen, covering my repaired dressing table with ornaments and plants, tidying of tool store under the stairs, sorting out correspondence. Gradually, things have places to go which is releasing space for nick-nacks to appear and generally make the place look more homely.
I'm also pleased to note that my weight remains at around 11 stone 3lbs (that's 70-odd kg for our metric readership). Given all that's happened with the move and the work and the cold weather, I would not have been surprised to see a falling off but I must be doing something right.
Time to mention Being John Malkovich which is quite the most seriously deranged film I have seen in a long time.
The whole notion of an intermediate floor 7½ in a building that contains a portal into the mind of someone else is just so bizarre but the film plays with all sorts of notions of identity and reality. It's a real pleasure to watch an intelligent film magically acted by its cast - John Cusack, Cameron Diaz and Catherine Keener. David says "Go watch".