Shades of Madness

OK, so my blog is a riot of incandescent colours.

I like bright and the longer I live in England the more I like it. On a beautiful day, England is a technicolour marvel- endless fields of red poppies, emerald green meadows, red brick toy towns nestling amongst them and just the bluest of blue skies. But a lot of the time, unfortunately, it’s shrouded in a steady grey drizzle, and that’s certainly true this summer. Luckily on our wedding day a month ago, we had the most glorious sunshine; it came out of nowhere, melting away at the end of the day for the rest of the summer.

You never really get used to a sodden grey world. Although England can be truly lovely in the sunshine or when frosted with snow in winter, all the woollies and romantic log fires on this itsy bitsy isle cannot stop the damp from creeping into your bones. And then it heads north for the little grey cells and that’s when madness sets in.

You crave warmth and colour to an unnatural degree; you find yourself buying big, furry, orange and purple jumpers (not one orange and one purple, but both together-stripey, like a bumblebee on LSD) ignoring the little voice of your Fashion Sense wailing inconsolably in the farthest reaches of your mind. You itch to filch your visiting sister’s many-hued ‘monkey cap’. You get into a crowded tram and think thoughts that would have been unimaginable in a similar situation in Kolkata; ‘How nice of this smelly old man to want to keep me warm!'

As the coldest months approach, you might even get a bit SAD. I scoffed at Seasonal Affective Disorder when I lived in sunny Kolkata and a hapless uncle (distant, I hasten to add) in Finland got it, yanked out all his hair, danced on tables and pulled faces at my aunt whom he pretended not to know (all in public), and then took himself off to an asylum by the Black Sea to recover from the trauma of having flipped his lid.

In England, we all get a bit SAD after Christmas, when there are still three months of winter to live through but no further festive loot from friends and family to cheer us up. Here, there is no exodus to the Black Sea or its equivalent, but there is a heightened sense of injustice and a flood of bitter complaints from just about everybody from the PM pontificating on telly to the office ‘hygienist’.

The English feel hard done by at the best of times but when the weather is really bad, they would even waylay a one-armed Rwandan boy soldier to sob on his shoulder (the remaining one). ‘Mustn’t grumble’ they cry, ‘but my life is the most blighted on the planet. It has rained all week and my Petunias are dead’. In the past, going out and bagging a nice sunny country would have done the trick, but this is a habit some of them want to kick. Now they resort to retail therapy, they buy bright clothes; ‘big boned’ women go marauding through malls to get themselves some eye-popping pick-me-up pink.

I am bitching, but really, I shouldn't; I may not be 'big boned’ yet but I have occasionally succumbed to the lure of luminescent raiments, as confessed earlier. It is also a rare sunny day and my beautiful garden beckons. Most of all, I am now married to the most wonderful man and I have this bright new blog to get me back into writing after seven long years.