That time of year again

Every year I get seasonal depression around the time of the equinox and every year it takes me by surprise. Every flipping year. At least I'm getting better at recognising it when it does hit, though. I also think that preserving food does help.

Yesterday was a bad day, in a big weepy meltdown sort of way. Today I feel better and I made sauerkraut, or at least started it.

Sauerkraut. Also little cucumbers, just because I saw a packet for sale in Lidl, and people had been talking about fermenting them in an online group.

It would be nice if the cabbage was home-grown, but even so, this is traditional preservation of seasonal veg, and it feels like the right thing to be doing at this time of year.

New Year Ramblings

As I started typing this post the sun came out and shone in through the window*. This feels like a rare treat and I'm tempted to jump up and go straight outside to appreciate it, but Ian's just made a cup of tea, and it's too wet out for sitting and drinking tea. It's been raining almost continuously since I wrote about the beautiful autumn weather we had in September and October. Apart from three or four days, we've had variations on light rain, heavy rain, and that kind of closed-in weather we get here where it's not exactly raining or foggy, but you get wet when you go outside anyway.

Since I usually suffer from seasonal depression, with my mood strongly affected by light, I'd expect to be feeling pretty dreadful about now. I'm glad to report that it's different this year. I'm certainly not enjoying these dark days, but they're making me feel grumpy rather than listless. I feel like a reasonably active human being who could get stuff done if only it wasn't so cold and wet. And if I didn't have a cat sitting on me.

As I've mentioned previously, I've had depression throughout this year, and I've been working through several issues. That is to say, instead of looking at depression as an illness in need of a cure (or treatment of symptoms), I've tried to find the underlying causes and address them directly. I know that for many people, depression doesn't have identifiable, psychological causes, but I suspected that in my case it did. That's not to say it's a straightforward response to currently depressing events, but that there are things buried in my psyche that are causing me problems. Some of the things I found were well buried indeed, relating to the death of my mother twenty seven years ago.

Without much in the way of responsibilities this year, I had the luxury of space to deal with my mental health. Time will tell how much healing has actually taken place but, cautiously, at this point in time, I feel that I've made a great deal of progress. I feel ready to start again with the garden, ready to reconnect with friends - I've been a hermit this year. If I said to you, You must come and visit! I really meant it, I just couldn't quite manage the necessary to make it happen - and ready to put my life back on the internet in the form of intermittent blog posts. In short, it feels like new year, and that looks a lot like a set of new year's resolutions. That makes me a bit nervous, knowing how such resolutions usually go, but hey ho, let's roll with it and see what happens.

In the meantime, here are some pictures of starlings coming in to roost under Aberystwyth pier, on a day of actual sunshine that we took advantage of, shortly before Christmas:

Here come the first of the starlings

Looking south along the seafront, there was a beautiful sunset

and in the other direction, the moon.

More starlings heading for the pier...

... and down to roost under it.

One more picture of the moon, with lamps and a few late starlings.

---

* This event was remarkable enough to make the news. I say news - this is a joke news site, but still, they were very quick to report this remarkable sighting!

What am I?

This isn't a riddle, it's a question I've genuinely been grappling with recently. Let me back up a little. I've been suffering from depression over the last month or so. I've found this quite hard to accept - I get seasonal depression, I can't be depressed in the summer! - or even recognise. When the sun is shining, spring flowers are out and the birds are singing, it can be quite hard to see that underneath my appreciation of all this, there are still some serious problems. However, it got bad enough to force me to face up to it when I just couldn't face going to an event that I'd usually enjoy a lot. I've been talking to my dear friend Sarah, who is a counsellor and has been helping me figure out what's going on in my head.

There are a couple of obvious things, like money worries and the general election result, but we've turned up some less obvious things too. One of these is loss of identity. I used to be a scientist, but I don't do science any more. It's been very hard to let go of; to accept that I no longer know what's going on in my field of research (or anyone else's, for that matter), that I'm no longer in a position to conduct experiments. If I'm not doing science any more, I'm not really a scientist, am I? I talked to Sarah about the difference between human being and human doing and, although I've come across the conceptual distinction before and it has intuitive appeal, if I'm honest, I just don't get it.

I am wedded to the idea that what one is is defined by what one does simply because I can't envisage a human who is not doing anything. If you take away all activity, what is left? If anything is left, I can't see that it differentiates between one human and another. I'll try another tack. Suppose we take a quality such as, kindness. It might be true to say that someone is a kind person even when they're not doing very much at the time. But isn't kindness just a disposition to act kindly? I can't find any meaningful qualities that don't come back to action in the end. I am a human doing.

So, what do I do? This a question that is often asked in social situations, when meeting new people. It's one I have trouble with; I don't really know what the answer is. It's not a bad question, and the person asking it is simply trying to find out a bit more about me. When I had a job that I felt reflected my personal identity (even, formed a big part of my identity), I had no problem with this question. Answering it would be a very concise way of conveying a lot of information about myself. Now, I don't have that kind of job. The occupation I've chosen is unpaid, but that's not the main problem. I'm not sure that self-sufficient is a very good representation of who I am, not least because I'm not very good at it. Competence is a big deal for me, but I'll leave that for another time.

I now have a disconnect. I accept the identification of a person with what they do, yet what I've chosen to do with my life doesn't feel like who I really am. What am I, then? I think I've found an answer that might work for me. I used to think of myself as a scientist, but if I go back a little further, to my undergraduate days, I had a dual identity. I studied both philosophy and psychology and at the time, was equally happy identifying with either. I pursued psychology as a career mainly because it seemed like a more realistic option. Now I've stopped doing that, perhaps I can re-identify with the other branch of my studies? I never really left philosophy behind. Look at this blog post: It's all about picking ideas apart. Human being vs human doing? What does that really mean? What's the point of asking, What do you do?

Rodin's The Thinker

This is what I do: I think about things. I am a philosopher. That's not an answer I'll give when people ask, What do you do? It sounds pretentious and is also misleading. I'm not doing philosophy at the highest level, and I'm not getting paid to do it. However, it is an answer that gives me an identity I'm comfortable with. An intellectual life has value, at least in my world view. I need no longer feel that I'm trying and failing to be self sufficient. This answer is for me. I still need to find an answer for other people, for use in casual social situations, but I hope that now the question won't be poking at an open wound. If I'm happy with my own view of myself, I don't mind too much what other people think of me.

The darkest time of the year (and a fireplace)

Take several months of financial stress, add seasonal depression, responsibility for a big, stressful event, a period of intense uncertainty (which isn't resolved yet, so I can't tell you about it) and on top of all that, a dead cat... well, it hasn't been the easiest autumn. There are good days and bad days.

On the good days, I've been working on the fireplace surround. This has been a ragged hole in the wall since I attacked it four years ago.

I've had some ideas about what to do here, but most of my ideas involved spending money, which we'd generally rather avoid, and is currently not an option for merely decorative projects. The part I was most certain of was the brick arch. It would be nice to get hold of some attractive bricks, but perhaps not entirely necessary. I started by searching the property for all the old bricks I could find. One was on the driveway, having been used as an alternative handbrake. Several were serving as a stand for the barbecue. Some were just lying around. Those you see in the photo above were the least scruffy/most similar to each other that I could find.

The next step was to clean the bricks as best I could without buying chemical cleaners (to be avoided for several reasons). Online advice suggested that dishwashing liquid might be worth a try, so I tried it, applied using brushes with both nylon and steel bristles. It didn't make much difference. My next attempt involved play dough. I made up a salt dough and pressed it onto the ends of the bricks, then baked them in a low oven until it was hard. The next day, I soaked it off, then scrubbed with dishwashing liquid again. I can't be entirely sure, but I think that quite a lot more soot came off the second time. Whether the play dough had anything to do with this, I have no idea.

Having selected my bricks, I still didn't know what to do with the edges of the fireplace. I'd quite like to leave the bricks bare, but as you can see, the brickwork is far from tidy. My cousin suggested brick slips - bricks made in thin tile shapes, including corner pieces, sold for applications just like this. It was a good suggestion, but.... money. Then a visiting friend suggested a wood surround. This is much more realistic as we have lots of old floorboards. I was sure I could find a couple of pieces that would suit. I even considered carving some decoration into them, but that would be quite a big project, not to be attempted before Christmas. In the meantime, I considered how to fix up a shelf above the fireplace.

I found the old shelf that had been there before, somewhat weathered now, but not necessarily any the worse for that. I was holding this up in position (it's just a little longer than the width of the arch - the ideal size), wondering what kind of brackets would be suitable, when Ian walked by and said, Ah, a mantlepiece! This comment set off a new train of thought. I'd been referring to the horizontal pieces of wood in my mind as a shelf, and shelves are typically supported by brackets. Mantlepieces, on the other hand, are often part of a fire surround, with supports that sometimes go right down to the floor. I wondered whether we might have any pieces of wood that I could use like that? Initially I was thinking of new cut timber that I might carve, but before long I lighted on the idea of using the leylandii trunks I got from cutting down the hedge. Quite a few of these have been turned into firewood, and some still have branches attached, but there were three trimmed and unburned. I selected the two longest and cut the ends straight across. Here they are in position, under the mantlepiece:

Leylandii trunks holding up mantlepiece and hiding scruffy brickwork

I'm quite pleased with this. They're currently held in place with bits of string - I'll fix them properly after Christmas. No, really, I will!

The bad days come with the rain. Not just the rain, but closed-in, up-in-the-clouds weather that blocks out light and warmth and joy for days on end. The air and the ground get saturated with water so that nothing's ever quite dry, and we get puddles in the store room.

Those orange dots at the top of the picture are squash. I'm having to keep a close eye on them so as to eat them up quickly as they start going mouldy.

The other day, some friends and I discussed what the point of Christmas is. We came up with quite a lot of points, and agreed that you can take your pick. My focus is to fend off the gloom and darkness of this time of year, and celebrate the return of the light. When my mood lifts sufficiently to get anything done, I'm focusing on Christmas. Today, I am mostly making sweets and - the reason I wanted the mantlepiece up before Christmas - I have decorations up.

Mouse ears and chocolate pigs

Evergreens and sparkly things around the fireplace

Tonight is both the solstice and the new moon, so it truly is the longest, darkest night of the year. After this, the light returns. Yuletide greetings to one and all!

Ugh

The thing I hate most about depression - apart from the sluggishness and not caring about anything - is that it makes me stupid. I can't concentrate, I get (even more) absent minded, I forget things. Then stuff like this happens:

Glass cover removed from solar panel when it was sunny, forgotten about, then blown over when it was windy.

Then I hate myself for being so stupid, and I just want to cry.

It's that time of year again

With the rapidly shortening days around the equinox, my SAD hit me again. At least this year I noticed it quickly, instead of spending a month wondering what was wrong with me. On top of this, for the last week or so the weather has been miserable. The clouds surround us, blocking out the sunlight and filling the air with moisture. Everything is dark, cold and damp. This doesn't help. So, um, sorry for the recent lack of blog posts.

It hasn't all been bad. This morning we had a few hours of sunlight, which lifted my mood enough to put these together:

Flyers for our next (and last) gig

On Friday a friend of mine posted some pictures of mushrooms on facebook, wondering what they were, and sent me a private message with their location, in case I was interested. I couldn't be sure from the photos, but they did look like ceps, so I went to see, and...

Cep, with cat for scale

... they're huge! That's not a trick with perspective, that mushroom really was that big. Unfortunately, it was also rather full of maggots, but they weren't all. My drying rack is now full of sliced mushroom - if only the humidity was a little less than 100%

I made some progress with the solar panels, then stopped when it got difficult. I'll tell you about that when I get back to it. Right now, the need to creosote woodwork does not sit well with the presence of mushrooms trying to dry in the same space.

I have harvested the sugar beet - a smallish barrow load (I haven't weighed them yet). This doesn't feel terribly positive right now, because the next task is to clean them.

Filthy sugar beet. They're not all this big.

One positive side of all this damp weather is that when the clouds do break, we often get very nice rainbows.

A thought on seasonal depression

Every year, I wonder what's wrong with me: Where has my enthusiasm gone? Why do I feel like such a failure? Then sometime around mid October the penny drops: It's autumn! I suffer from SAD - that's why I'm feeling rubbish. You'd think I'd learn, wouldn't you?

This year, I noticed something else, though. While my motivation for things that I ought to be doing (fixing the conservatory roof; publicity for Wild West Wales) was rock bottom, I was quite happy foraging and preparing food for storage. These can be quite tedious tasks, but I had no problem motivating myself to wash and dry laver, or to peel and chop a whole carrier bag full of apples that a friend gave me.

This made me wonder about the nature of seasonal depression. It's always struck me as evolutionarily implausible that so many people should feel sluggish for quite such a large proportion of the year. I could understand it in the darkest, coldest months, when hibernation looks like a good strategy, but SAD often kicks in with the rapidly shortening days, particularly around the equinox in September. I wonder whether it's not actually a general depression, but a switch in motivation to food gathering and storage, at the expense of everything else. In our modern world, there's not much opportunity to express that single preoccupation, so all we see is the loss of motivation to do anything else.

Like much of evolutionary psychology, this has more than a hint of the just-so story about it, but it does make a testable prediction: If I could focus all my energy on food gathering and storage throughout September, October and November, and not worry about doing anything else, then I wouldn't feel depressed. I wonder if it would be possible to arrange my life that way?