Some bunch of hopeless astrological tosspots appears to think it's Spring. What's more, they appear to have convinced the sky of this folly, because when I woke up this morning, all set to jump on my exercise bike and bitch about the usual April drizzle outside my South Wales window (my American friends, you might have to Google it - Wales is sort of like New Jersey, a chunk of land attached to somewhere Much More Important, where everyone absolutely loses their shit if you try and tell them of their relative irrelevance), the picture here is what I saw instead. Blazing blue, Simpson-fluffy, and dazzled by some demented bright yellow ball of heat (it's just out of shot in the picture. Honest).
There are plenty of jokes to be made about the fact that Wales doesn't really have a climate, so much as a penitence for being really really bad in a previous life. I've made a few of them myself to d, my wife, who's both American and a believer in the Fundamental Goodness of Things and People (still, after ten years married to me). To be fair, I only used to make the jokes because she used to get right up my nose every time we visited by prancing off the train like a fairy godmother and declaring "Oh, how beautiful and bright it is!" I think what really got to me about that was that for her, it was!
The usual Welsh weather, which is fundamentally like Scottish weather only less imaginitive, always used to fuck right off and hide whenever she stepped into town. Blazing Christmases abounded - one year, as if to give me the right royal meteorological finger, it began to snow the minute our train pulled out as we were leaving. Not for nothing, but people have pretty much taken to calling us the Sunshine Fairy and the Drizzle Imp.
But I'm a rationalist and I'm not about to argue with evidence, so yes, hip hip hooray, the Spring has come to our little South Wales town - at least for a day or two. Men and women of the Valleys are out giving their armpit-hair an airing, all wearing their shades, some 'proper,' some 'off the market'. The nation's children suddenly have nothing to do but run, and screm and cavort, like the little vitamin d-starved wretches they are, pointing at the sun.
All of which raises issues for your average Disappearer. To be fair, every season brings its own issues for your average Disappearer. In the Winter, there's a primal, instinctive urge to stay indoors with a big bar of chocolate and pretend to be mostly dead. In the Autumn, at least round here, there's a primal, instinctive urge to build an ark and start collecting animals. But Spring and Summer are the painted harlots of the calendar year (I should add that my wife tries to convince me there are actually five seasons, and that Autumn and Fall are two different things, but then she also tries to convince me that Ecru and Lobster are colours, and that's not happening either).
Spring and Summer make you want to not have deadlines or day jobs. They make you wistful for your youth (or at least for that bit after your youth when you'd gotten over your awkwardness and there were things like sex and pub lunches over which to linger). And they make you feel that nothing is anywhere near as bad as you thought it was when you began this silly Disappearing business, and you should just chill out, join the rest of society and have a choc ice and a beer.
Verily I say unto you, resist! Resist the tantalising winkings of the Spring and Summer both, for they lead only to satisfaction and chilling the hell out. These things are not for you, Disappearer! Shun them! Put them behind you! Now, say three gastric bands and an ex-lax, then go inside and whip yourself.
To be at least vaguely serious for a moment, there's a real dilemma beneath my cod-preaching. I remember it of old - the battle between long-term and short-term goals. Long-term means getting on the bike while all the cool kids are hanging out and laughing and having beer and pizza. Short term means joining them, then feeling that awful crunching moment of loathing and despair come weigh-in time, when all the cool kids have gone home, and there's just you and the truth.
Of course, there's at least a partial way to have your Disappearing cake and eat it. Rather than sticking to your indoor calorie-burners, get out there and do what you can do. I walked around our local lake six times this morning before breakfast, and enjoyed both the wonder of bottle green-headed ducks, and white apparently pissed-off swans, and noisy-ass, bawling the odds Canada geese (endless fun, incidentally, is to be had translating bird-noise into human speech, especially with a gift like Canada geese, eh?), and that smug self-satisfaction of having walked 3.5 miles and burned enough calories to make a porridge breakfast null and void.
d is by far the more sensible of the two of us. She's the one who, at midnight last night, dragged me away from the computer screen and told me to come to bed. And so it was she who this evening dragged me away from the screen again come enjoy the sociable world. We had dinner out together (Nandos, chicken burger (no skin), sweet potato mash, pitta bread and red pepper dip), and it helped me relocate the smile I'd buried since the geese under flotsam and jetsam and the joy of running my own business as well as having a day job (which starts again tomorrow). It was great to have that particular 'cake' too, a moment of normality in a day otherwise crammed with deadlines and to-do lists.
And now it's done, and so very nearly is this blog, and the big yellow ball of harlotry and fun has very nearly gone away, just a tinge of pink left on the soft blue horizon, which can mean only one thing - it's time to get back on the exercise bike and pedal my ass off!
Tomorrow is many things - weigh-in day, day-job day, Starbucks day and, rather pleasingly, reuniting with old schoolfriend day. At least two of these things have the power to quash my generalised bonhomie like a bug beneath its feet. But for now, Happy Springtime, people!
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