THERE ARE SOME DAYS, many of them in August, where everything is so miserable and depressing that you can feel all your energy, confidence, and self-respect disappearing over the horizon with its arse on fire. You then have a choice: either you can immediately book yourself a four-month holiday in the Caribbean or, if that’s not possible for some reason, you can pull yourself together.
The difficulty is that when you’re feeling glum, the last thing you want to do is to pull yourself anywhere. The only thing you want to pull is the phone charger out of the wall, the top off a bottle of gin, and the duvet over your head.
Oddly, when you’re feeling low the first instinct is to do a whole range of things that immediately make you feel worse; you sleep with someone 90% unsuitable for the 10% comfort factor; you go shopping for clothes that are 90% overpriced and 10% suitable; and then you eat a catering tub of ice cream, which makes you feel 90% sick and 10% depressed. You then don’t go to a party because you feel so miserable, and then you wonder why no one phones you (they’re all at the party).
When you feel glum, you think that the world is an awful place, that everything in it is conspiring against you, and that never has one person suffered so much. Try standing in front of a mirror, repeating that to yourself, and see if you can keep a straight face. If you can, then put yourself through the following emergency de-glumming programme.
Firstly, get moving. Either take your dog for a walk so long it thinks it’s auditioning for a remake of Incredible Journey, or go to the gym and test your lycra to destruction. When you get home, put a load of washing on, make something large and hot to eat, wash up all your dirty dishes, tidy up the whole house, throw lots of old things away, pour yourself a large drink, and then look through your photo album to remind you of the good times. (Don’t do this if you generally look like a dork in photos.)
Then, have another large drink, put your favourite album on at an unethically high volume, and then dance around like an idiot until you collapse with exhaustion. And finally, when you get into bed, remember, however bad things are, they’re a lot worse in other parts of the world. Except in the Caribbean, of course.
© GUY BROWNING IS THE AUTHOR OF ‘NEVER PUSH WHEN IT SAYS PULL’ AND CREATOR OF ‘TORTOISE IN LOVE’ (DVD) – USED BY PERMISSION.
