Blue Monday...

Yesterday was Blue Monday, it slipped in quietly almost unannounced and sat down beside me. Blue Monday, the most miserable day of the year, the day when if something could go wrong it would go wrong.

I heard it on the radio, on the news – Blue Monday. I don’t know why it’s been declared the most miserable day of the year – it’s not my birthday, it’s not a Wednesday, it’s not the anniversary of the day that I realised that holding onto the moon wasn’t an option any longer and let it float away into the darkness. But I heard it on the news yesterday morning that yesterday, Monday 18th January, was officially the bluest day of the year, Blue Monday, official.

Maybe someone is trying to make us all a touch more miserable and paranoid than we usually are, but I wish that they wouldn’t - we really don’t need an official miserable day, not with so many unofficial miserable days around. I heard that some tweeters on Twitter reacted furiously to the news and started to tweet happy thoughts out to combat Blue Monday. I even read some; ‘the sun is shining’, ‘smile it’ll make you feel better’, ‘think happy and the world will be happy’. Those thoughts were bound to make Blue Monday react, so I decided to take no chances. If this was going to be the most depressing day of the year I’d have to call on every charm I possessed into action.

First I put on the lucky socks. These are the socks that Gaynor bought me one Valentine’s Day over twenty years ago from Next. I wear them whenever I have a challenging day ahead or I’m worried about having a ‘bad luck’ day and unbelievably even after twenty years they are still almost as good as new, the elastic is fine, there are no holes, and they are very nearly as black as the day that she bought them. I am invincible in these socks, no harm can mar me, I am protected. I’ve even been known to wash and dry these wondrous socks overnight each night for weeks at a time in particularly difficult periods.

Then there’s my voodoo dolls, the ones that hang from the mirror in my car, the ones that ward off the evils. I have three and they each ward off a specific sort of trouble. Stroking them three times keeps the bad at bay, I can’t tell you how though, it might break the ju-ju and the protection spells might dissipate.

And of course there’s the usuals… the multiple saluting of magpies, the anticlockwise stirring of tea, and the whistling at corners in shadow. My protections.

So, how did Blue Monday go? I think I got away with it, but we’ll see what Tuesday brings - and Wednesday, and Thursday and Friday, Saturday, Sunday…
What am I going to do when my socks wear out?