Overall it’s hard not to feel a bit swindled. The reports for the preceding forty-eight hours had been full of blizzard warnings for most of the known universe, or at least for dear old Blighty. And to be sure the East Coast did get a bit of a snowy pummeling.
We might have known when first the forecast started to slip from “Thursday” to “… around tea-time” to “… probably after seven”, that we were not to be blessed by so much as a solitary flake. Although actually I might have seen one or two playing fitfully on a chilly gust in the middle of the afternoon visiting round yesterday, or it might have been a slightly tardy post-hogmanay hang-overish sort of thing.
Instead today sees Ambridge submerged in the middle of a damp, clingy cloud of fog, and swept with successive bursts of fine cold drizzle. And the same cold, wet, numbing grip appears to have descended on the minds of most of the locals, or at least most of those attending surgery this past couple of days.
Fair to say, the rot had begun to set in on New Year’s Eve. It’s almost a cliché I know, but I can’t seem to get through a NYE surgery without encountering a least a couple of suicidally depressed patients presenting that day, for the very first time, and wanting everything sorted out right then. This year was no exception and it has sort of set the pattern for the past few days.
O.K. the high drama of NYE has been replaced by the dawning realization that we’ve all got another whole year ahead of us, so the actual impetus to self immolation has receded. Instead consultations seem to alternate between the flat, affectless and moping on the one hand, and the jittery, agitated, “free-floating” anxious on the other.
I can’t help noticing some of the patients seem a bit down in the dumps too.
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3 comments:
Snow? Where? Not here, where the "föhn" is blowing and it's 14C. Every little scrap of snow has melted, even that horrid tenacious frozen bit that laughs smugly in your face when you peer out at dawn or dusk and has the bottom strip of lawn in its icy grasp until early March.
I miss it. :(
Your patients are right - January is the pits.
Snow? Not even the merest hint of it here on the coast. Though happily we haven't got that puky thing either!
January is best just got through without too much thought if at all possible, hope for the sunlight!
We managed a bit of snow, but it did not last for more than a day. Loved the last sentence of your post! Good to keep cheerful!
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