Slightly More Optimistic Than Usual

To paraphrase that old children's song: The sun has got his hat on, hip hip hip hooray, now everyone can start complaining that it's too fucking hot rather than too fucking cold. I've used this time of yellow daylight, as opposed to grey daylight, to wear cooler clothing, stand outdoors and gaze at bees and stuff in a fairly awestruck manner. There's just something about the summer months that feel so jolly to me, which is weird since I'm pale, burn easily and tend to suffer from hayfever so badly that a single sneeze could shatter a wine glass at fifty paces. Maybe it's the potential and oft speculated, yet never actually checked out, confirmed and diagnosed Seasonal Affective Disorder outweighing the neck-wringing winter time with an extra dose of optimism. Maybe it's the fact that I was born in June and something deep within the season resonates with my very being. Maybe it's the fact that Eurovision's on next week (or this week [or last week and I need to catch up {more brackets in brackets!}]) and it's always fun to spend one of the first nights of summer doing exactly the same as what I've done for the last six months - stayed in, watched TV and not gone outdoors.

Outdoor time seems more appropriate nowadays though and these once depressing babbles of nothing will hopefully soon transform into slightly more optimistic babbles of nothing. Case in point, this. I've spent the entire day trying to think of something to ramble off onto this thing for your eyes to look at and your brain to attempt to make sense of, but there's a reason why I'm suddenly typing this out at 7:45pm rather than any "normal" time. The muse of creativity has escaped me, or it never even passed by in the first place, but I probably saw it in the background as an extra on Casualty or something last week. (I'd just like to clarify that that's obviously a lie... I don't watch Casualty. Is Casualty even still on these days? Why am I here?) Kicking my thought process into gear has proved rather difficult lately which just goes to show that, despite being slightly more optimistic than usual today, I'm still crap. The only difference here is that today I actually feel alright about it.

With creativity barely existing within the realms of my mind/body/soul/television, I've had to resort to doing productive things, you know, that serve some kind of purpose. I'm coming up to the end of my first year dwelling in this student house and all throughout the year, myself and my living colleagues have had to suffer the sight of an overgrown garden that seemingly hasn't been attended to since the Ancient Romans probably constructed a road in the same spot. Needless to say, it was a jungle out there. It's okay though, we learned to keep the kitchen blinds constantly closed so that we'd never have to look at it, not that we could because the world was in a state of perpetual darkness over the winter period anyway. But, of course, I speak of this overgrown, jungle-like garden in the past tense now. After sitting indoors for most of the afternoon and realising what a glorious day this is and questioning why I'm not on the opposite side of the walls surrounding me and arguing back that I don't have a reason to go outside at all, I stopped myself and realised that since nobody else is uprooting that mess in the back for us, there was only one thing for it. Well, technically two things: gardening gloves and a rake (well, actually that's three things if you count the gloves separately).

Two-and-a-half hours and one aching, arched back later, most of the wild foliage is either in one of three black binbags, ravaged in a pile of dead leaves and loose roots or, in the case of one particular corner of the contained area, still untouched. It were a big job, yanno. It's nice to know that the garden will look clear at somewhat tidy (or at least tidier than it was) during the summer months when nobody will be here to enjoy the space. And we'll all come back in September, the freak of nature that is the entirety of the ground will have disobeyed the super-strength weedkiller and smatterings of table salt we thought might work to stop things growing and the place will end up another impassable jungle for us to look at in the dull grey light of winter from the kitchen window, but never for us to venture into.

Ah, the circle of life. Que sera, sera. Etc. Happy summertime.