Setting the Clocks Back

Setting The Clocks Back

Mr. Los Angeles loves it when the clocks go back. Mr. Los Angeles, a poet at his soul, has taken the American expression “spring forward, fall back” and added his own personal twist to it: bounding eagerly to adjust the clocks in the house on the night of the time change, he will beam broadly and boom in a delighted baritone, “Spring bad, fall good.”

Photo by Drazen Nesic on Unsplash

For the quintessentially Southern Californian Mr. Los Angeles, the day the clocks go back has never signified anything more or less than an extra hour to spend in bed one Sunday morning in early November. Mr. Los Angeles, as I am given to remind him, has spent his life so swaddled in meteorological good fortune that he doesn’t – as they say in England – know he‘s born. When I lived in London, the day the clocks went back was one I dreaded, the herald of a soul-sucking and ever-lengthening march of darkness both physical and emotional that lasted the winter through.

I suffer from Season Affective Disorder, that particularly grim form of depression that descends on some of us through the winter months when sunshine is limited. As Northern Hemisphere countries go, England does not become unbearably cold during the winter – it is milder than Sweden, for instance, and has nothing on Minnesota or even New York. The challenge, for many of us, is the lack of light. As the year draws to a close, the sun more or less vanishes, appearing ever more grudgingly if it appears at all, lurking ever lower in the sky during the day and setting ever earlier in the evening, until day after day after day has become one somber progression after another of black yielding to grey and fading to black again. And for those of us susceptible, the psychological effect is painful.

I inherited SAD from my late and sainted mother, which I always find mildly puzzling, since in a family ethnicity whose very southernmost point of origin is the sunbaked clay of County Cork, you would have supposed our genes would have had time by now to have adapted at least somewhat to the occasional grey day. You would have supposed wrong. When exposed to the dark of London winter months, I become what I like to remember – although recollections, as they say, may vary – as, simply, sweetly melancholy. My mother, not a noticeably mild-mannered woman at the best of times, would turn into a raging harpy.

For the first three decades of my life, I was unaware that these debilitating mood changes were in any way remarkable, supposing that for both her and me they were simply a part of the human condition, along with overdue library fines and going to the lavatory. Then I discovered Los Angeles.

I came to Los Angeles for a six month working trip that turned into two years. There were many things, I discovered, that I liked about the city – its lifestyle, its people, its optimism, the Pacific Ocean … and the startling revelation that in the winter, the afternoon light would linger into the evening for a length of time I had never known it was possible for winter light to linger. I remember one December day in my first year here peering through the window of my pocket handkerchief apartment near the junkyard in Santa Monica, and still seeing light in the air – not much light, but light nevertheless – at 5.00 in the evening. This, to me, was nothing short of miraculous.

Back in those psychologically ill-educated days, I didn’t think to put the light together with my improved mood in sunny Southern California. I was having a faintly indecent level of fun in Los Angeles anyway, and there were very many reasons why I was happier there than I had been in London. In fact, I was having so much fun that when one day in late September I finally put aside my silly little adventure and boarded the plane to return to sensible, grown-up London, it was with a distinctly heavy heart that I did so.

My heart grew heavier as the English winter wore on, but then, I reasoned glumly as I trudged through streets that were dimly hazy in the morning and benighted by the middle of the afternoon, it would, wouldn’t it? I missed Los Angeles in all sorts of ways; I was adrift on yet another of the succession of shipwrecks that characterized my younger romantic life; and for some reason my mother had grown even more challenging to deal with than I remembered. It was clearly not proving easy for me to re-acclimatize myself to London; but, as I gloomily admonished myself in the pitch black afternoon, I’d just have to wait it out until I got used to it again. As that same mother was given to announce, ringingly if not with what you’d call cockle-warming compassion, even lobsters get used to being boiled.

As the winter dragged on, it seemed, it dragged us all down with it. In February I flew to Rome to visit an uncle there, and when I stepped off the plane into a clear blue sky, found myself crying tears of joy. Over Easter my friend Kate and her boyfriend drove to northern France for the weekend and, once on the European mainland, kept driving south until they hit sunshine in Spain. My mother, with whom I had once laughed so hard that we would have physically to clutch onto each other for support, had locked both her laughter and her heart in a case of fury and thrown away the key.

Slowly, reluctantly, the tyranny of the season began to release itself. Crocuses began to appear in the ground, and then daffodils, and then birds began to sing. The evenings began to draw out; the clocks at last sprang forward. At last, one glorious day, the sun actually shone.

One weekend in late June, I took my courage and my daughterly duty into my hands and went to visit my parents. My mother was sitting in the garden, and as soon as I saw her, I could see there was something different about her. Her body language was relaxed. She had turned her face to the sky and was smiling. She was … could she possibly be in a good mood?

“Isn’t it lovely the sun’s shining?” she said. “It’s lovely to see you, darling, how are you?”

It was only then that I realized that for the last eight months, my mother had been suffering from one level or another of clinical depression. She had been unhappy; and because she had been unhappy she had been bad-tempered; and being bad-tempered had made her more unhappy still. And this was her life, I now realized, for eight months out of every year. And, furthermore – since it also now struck me that I, too, was today feeling happier than I had for some months – unless I took measures, it might all too well be mine too.

Seasonal Affective Disorder was not, of course, the sole reason why, a few weeks later, I packed up again and took myself permanently back to Los Angeles – many people in London suffer from SAD and are able to find perfectly efficient ways to deal with it. But I went back to Los Angeles anyway.

All these years later, I still love the cool Los Angeles winter. I love the diamond-bright daylight that suggests cold without actually inflicting more than a suggestion of it; I love the drama of flinging on just the one sweater and telling myself it’s chilly outside; I love sitting by the window at the end of the day, watching the mist creep in from the ocean, drinking tea and feeling pleasantly wistful as the not too early afternoon turns gently to a not too early evening. I even enjoy – in moderation, and on the strict understanding that the sun will shine again tomorrow – the grey days.

And I think of my poor, angry mother, who spent two thirds of her life in such misery, and hope that wherever she is now, she is somehow, somewhere, sitting in a garden, turning her face to the sky and thinking how lovely it is that the sun is shining.