Nicholas Craig column
Jan 6 2006 By Nicholas Craig, The Journal
If you thought the first day back at work this week was bad, or that nothing could plumb the depths you suffered on New Year's Day, grit your teeth.
Worse is yet to come. The most depressing day of the year, it has been declared, is Tuesday 24 January. A Welsh academic settled on the day using an elaborate formula - 1/8W+(D-d) 3/8xTQ MxNA.
Bad weather, debt, fading Christmas memories, failed resolutions and a lack of motivation combine to produce a powerful depressant. We are not only miserable in the office and home, but equally gloomy on the roads in January. Winter driver's disorder increases the rate of road rage and the number of accidents, according to an insurance company.
Every cloud, however, has a silver lining, and this is the time of year businesses that focus on diets, detoxes, lifestyle changes and hobbies come into their own. Health club memberships blossom, personal life coaches fill their diaries and diet DVD producers push out thousands of extra copies.
If you, like me, are not one of those lifestyle businesspeople, you could instead hope that the boss has read the soothing words of a recruitment director who suggests that chiefs should be `extra nice' to employees on the most depressing day of the year.
Visions of holiday vouchers, champagne lunches and pampering makeovers for tired faces and muscles come to mind. Not to the recruitment guru, unfortunately, who breezily proposes free tea for staff as the perfect pick-me-up.
Given that the boss is likely to be in the same gloom-ridden state of mind as the rest of us, even a free cuppa will remain a fond hope for most companies.
The Cardiff professor who predicted the peak of misery also forecast the happiest day of the year in 2005. It was June 24, when increased outdoor activity, high energy levels, and more sunlight combined to create a national good mood. The formula was commissioned by Wall's Ice Cream, no doubt in the interests of scientific and philosophical debate on the nature of happiness. Returning briefly to reality I am reminded that the day after D-Day is the 25 January - Burns Night. This is always a jolly affair, not only in Scotland but worldwide.
It also goes to prove that haggis producers, who celebrate their busiest month in January, are the happy exception to the depressing rule. Lang may their lums reek.
