Full circle

Nine out of ten I sleep with the curtains wide open and the sun would playfully seep into my room every morning with that ‘Wake up you unlucky bastard’ kinda smile. I rub the slumber of my eyes and shuffle for the mobile to check the godforsaken time. Five thirty or some such obscene hour it reads. Now that’s both good and bad. Good because of all the extra hours you can sleep before reality and office time kicks in and bad because it still is a godamn interruption to some quality REM sleep.

But what strikes me most is not the bloody regularity with which I forget to keep curtains drawn, but the simple fact that the seasons have gone around one complete cycle and are back where they were one year back. I remember coming to Norfolk one hot sunny July day, black jumper clad and all that surprised at the long vigil that the beaming sun was putting in. And in the melee of finding a house, finding a room mate who can cook (he does not read my blog so it’s ok) and finding the nearest Sainsbury’s, a couple of fleeting months slip by. Trees shed leaves, temperatures drop and one fine day you walk into M&S and invest in a leather jacket with a fleece lined collar. It rains that very evening and a fleece lined collar begins to like the dumbest idea ever conceived to man.

Bare trees, even lower temperatures and a distant memory of sunny summer days. Long faces, black jackets and the women in tank tops whom you saw in July have all disappeared. You feel home sick and bored and soak in the bloody gloom like a sponge bar. Christmas brightens things a bit. Lights, a sprinkle of snow and a hundred innovative ways to burn a hole in your pocket. You buy, you binge, you endure and finally one day you see flowers on the once bare trees. The big heavy jackets get strung up on hangars and trees blaze a flaming red and violet in celebration. Jeez, its spring.

A couple of bank holiday weekends and the girls in tank tops are back on the streets. The hem lines have dropped, the neck lines are dropping and sun lotions are jutting out of the racks back at Boots. I am sitting here rubbing the sleep of my eyes as the sun gatecrashes into my bedroom. Godamit. It’s been a year.