the elements (part 1)

Date: 28 September 2010 11:36:08

As part of my ongoing battle against the demon Mind, I have begun using my SAD lamp again. It is now very late September and Scotland simply doesn't get enough sunshine during the winter for people to stay healthy. There are higher levels of many health problems as a consequence. So what I must do (and I must begin in September or my body clock gets broken and there's no point bothering) is sit in front of a VERY BRIGHT LIGHT for half an hour every day (using capitals is the only way to get the experience across to you in text). This doesn't exactly give you Vitamin D but it stimulates a hormone in your body which manufactures it. Apparently.

Darkness is a funny old thing. I've always thought I'd quite like to hibernate, but I'm not actually designed for that, and neither are you. So getting no exercise and living in the dark will make me want to die quite quickly. As I plough further into cures like drugs, exercise and light therapy, I'm ever more aware that people must have suffered such conditions for hundreds, thousands of years before me. I now have a very rickety basic scientific appreciation of what's going on inside me, but what did they do?

To be honest it seems many of them just went mad.

Three cold days passed. The thermometer never made it up to the zero mark, not even at midday. Shadow wondered how people had survived this weather in the days before electricity, before thermal face masks and lightweight thermal underwear, before easy travel... He asked Hinzelmann.

"For real?" asked Hinzelmann.

"For real," said Shadow.

"Well," said the older man. "Sometimes they didn't survive it, and they died. Leaky chimneys and badly ventilated stoves and ranges killed as many peoiple as the cold. But those days were hard - they'd spend the summer and the fall laying up the food and the firewood for the winter. The worst thing of all was the madness. I heard on the radio, they were saying how it was to do with the sunlight, how there isn't enough of it in the winter. My daddy, he said folk just went stir crazy - winter madness they called it. Lakeside always had it easy, but some of the other towns around here, they had it hard. There was a saying still had currency when I was a kid, that if the serving girl hadn't tried to kill you by February she hadn't any backbone.

- Neil Gaiman, American Gods

During summer it seems to make sense to think of winter as something like a passing season. The City Glasgow becomes more fallible as the darkness gathers. Where once you could believe this was how the world had always been, paved and timetabled and driven on petrol and money, once the winds start cutting at you you know we're only a few dozen generations from wilderness. Wait till you're walking home at 11 on a Novermber evening. Watch the clouds form hagshapes and scud between you and the cold moon. The trees we've tamed and tethered (as though we had mastered them) still stretch their jagged arms to the wind, as their mothers did in the black nothingtime winters before you or your warm socks were thought of. It's the city that's impermanent. It's the city - it's us - that will soon be gone. The wind and the rain and the dark and the madness were here first, and they'll be here a long time after us, too.

So we huddle in our special huts, and think of our triumph over the elements.

There's more to say about this. I have a peculiar relationship with sunshine and it might be time she answered for her crimes.