Are you worried that you might be suffering from S.A.D.? Are you worried about anything at all? If so, you might be suffering from S.A.D., which is a depressing thought. Almost as depressing as those bloody grey clouds and that bitter wind that's tossing a damp jumper on your clothes-line up and round and about in an endless and meaningless tumult which only looks like a hollow parody of anger or excitement.
Isn't it funny how the sky seems to speak to us of our existence, like a loftily suspended HDBlu/Gray screen? On bright days the sky seems as huge and rich as our lives and love. On overcast days we appear to be confronted by the almost unbroken dreariness and indifferent pallor of our lives, the manner in which we shamble around our little rat-run world, hopelessly blinded to our imprisonment by either utter thoughtlessness, thoughts directed towards things like interest rates and how much we'd like to see Simon Cowell slip on a supermodel-dipped condom and break his spine falling down a large set of marble steps, or by our insolent and insoluble interest in ourselves.
No, it isn't funny at all. The sky isn't speaking to anyone. If anything, it's floating – like a big invisible poo in a puddle of infinite piss.
Do sentiments such as the above leave you feeling in any sense disturbed, angered or deflated? Well, then, you are definitely suffering from S.A.D. Just in case you aren't quite convinced of the crushing weight of the mental malaise you live under yet, I've compiled a helpful (and hurtful!) list of typical symptoms the typical S.A.D.-afflicted person might expect to suffer in the long cold months of October, November, December, January, February, March, April, May and most of June, July, August and September (as well you would expect them to, the pathetic mewling worms).
SYMPTOMS
When watching Strictly Come Dancing, the usual urge to find a conveniently available stranger that can be beaten around the face with your shivering fist until their bones are jutting from their sloppy cheek-tissue like the red-rib-rack of a raw steak is sharply overtaken by a much more powerful and pleasant desire to hang yourself from the ceiling until your neck swells up and reddens like a cow's lumpen heart.
You have recently abandoned plans to become Abingdon's number one UK funky and bassline house DJ and now find yourself playing bass guitar in a band called Simple Simon who sing about yearning and regret in reassuringly obscure terms and all wear Gap jumpers, even when having sex.
Where once the folds of your curtains looked to you like snug orifices signifying the richly pored skin of a fecund Mother Earth, now they probably have asbestos in them or something.
Rain feels wetter.
Individual parts of your body, including your elbows and nostril hair, feel shagged out.
When you get out of bed in the evening, you are depressed to find that its dark outside already. You are also depressed to find that you've missed Paul O Grady's latest show. Following this, you realise that you are depressed that you've missed Paul O Grady's latest show, and remember that you have a big essay to do on the Stoics and Epicureans, which is a bit sour.
The acronym ''S.A'.D'' appears to spell ''Sad'' to you.
Earlier on in the year you were sat out in the garden with some soulful 2-step playing on the stereo, reading a magazine, cradling a sweet dry cigarette in your lips and contemplating going down the park in a few hours to play volleyball with the female cast of Hollyoaks. Now you're sat in the toilet, listening to your bowels lurch in their casing like a starving pig against the wooden bars of its village cage, gnawing at the sores on your dry purple lip. A moment ago you saw that woman from the Antiques Roadshow floating through the drizzle outside, and you stood up to wave to her, and one of your balls protruded forward, as blotchy red as your cheeks soon became.
When you make a snowball you try to throw it but then are frozen by its similarity to the tumour that is probably going to appear in your testicles when you're in your early thirties.
You find yourself staring, absent-mindedly, out of windows at the endless white swathes of sky atop a thousand stilts of shivering water, and when you look down five minutes later your wrist has mysteriously fallen to bits all over the sink.
Even after you put on six layers of fleece lined winter clothing, you still feel a cold sweat erupting across your sallow skin. You strongly suspect that this is a spiritual sensation, resulting from you being completely alone and helpless in a universe which, if it isn't Godless, expresses only the tangled pandemonium of a ruined consciousness which is, nevertheless, at least an infinite number of times more organised and significant than your own little pea brain.
Whenever you murder a child in the woods, you are compelled to dig through extremely hard and sometimes snow-covered ground in order to bury it afterwards. It is also markedly less satisfying strangling prostitutes when you're wearing thick gloves.
The view from your window once encompassed miles and miles of achingly beautiful and tantalisingly distant countryside. Now you can just about make out someone in an upstairs room watching Deal or No Deal on a High Definition TV that is better than any that you could ever afford.
The Christmas TV schedules, which would have inspired wonder and thankfulness if they had been pushed forward to July now somehow seem to be bloody awful.
Those gold rimmed sunglasses you bought in June are now miraculously both useless and absurd. The same goes for the pink and lime green bermuda shorts you bought in August, and the twenty two boxes of Soleros.
You used to be the only person on your street who lived in complete darkness with all your curtains closed 24 hours a day. Now everyone is doing it, and you don't feel so special.
The Burial album no longer sounds almost completely boring.
Despite ingesting several grammes of the serotonin-splurging wonder-drug MDMA over the weekend, you now feel a bit glum.
Whenever you have to stagger from your bedroom to the toilet with your boxer shorts around your ankles, smudges of grey gutcum slithering down your thighs like slugs catapulted into a brick wall, a dim physiological reflection of the waste and self-abasement your meaningless and contemptuous life has turned out to be, there's a bloody draft blowing up the stairs and you go pimply like a grotesque slab of axe smacked chicken.
CURE
Start a blog, you poor bastard.
