Blue Monday


Today is supposedly 'Blue Monday', the most depressing day of the year. Twenty years ago, probably in a bid to sell more holidays, a travel company released the results of some research it had commissioned, employing a psychologist to come up with a ‘scientific formula’ for low mood at this time of year. Although the way the phrase regularly resurfaces and swirls around social media shows the stickiness of the concept. This time last year my teenage daughter was out of school, and it certainly felt a particularly bleak time. I spent my days researching options, chasing down possible support, crafting emails, meeting professionals who expressed dismay that we seemed to be ‘slipping through the cracks’ as they put it. As if what was happening to our family was some kind of careless mistake, rather than the systemic failure of education and health institutions to meet the needs of my autistic child.

This January some of that work has paid off, and my daughter is now attending a small specialist education setting part-time. This means she has the opportunity to complete some of her GCSEs, but probably more importantly, to be with other young people who have had similar experiences in mainstream education, to make friends. And in this time of relative stability, I must put myself back together too, make the most of my time. In the last week I have taken the long way round on the walk back from the shops, taking advantage of winter sunshine to wander through a Victorian cemetery, listening to birdsong and enjoying the glossy green holly still thick with bright berries. On another day I visit a community allotment that hosts a gardening for wellbeing project. The place is hemmed in by houses but is somehow secluded and tranquil, it has been tended for years by volunteers, a sense of care hangs over it that is comforting. I stack wood, mulch broad beans and help skim a pond full of leaves. The session begins and ends with cups of tea around a campfire, how civilised.

My daughter being at school also makes space for me to go back to work, if only temporarily. In the week ahead I’m booked for a couple of freelance days at forest school. What I particularly enjoy about working outside even in the greyest of winter days, is that you are there to notice the moments when the skies do briefly lighten, something it’s easy to miss on a January day indoors. Here's to those glimmers...




This week I saw Hamnet, sitting weeping in the dark with a roomful of strangers. I loved the book and felt that the film captured it well, plus it was beautiful and lush to look at, into the greenwood indeed. I've been reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for book group, one of those classics that I had somehow not got round to reading, and also a book of English Folklore from 1940.

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