Last week you were told all about mid-season blues. To cut to the chase I’m here to tell you it belongs in the same drawer with the abominable snowman, the Loch Ness monster, the lone gunman and the female orgasm. It simply doesn’t exist unless, as one former saisonnaire I spoke to about it commented, you’re doing it wrong (the blues, not the orgasm).
We used to talk about the same thing at Oxford, the fifth week blues. I was waxing idiotic about definitely feeling a case of them coming on in my first year when a fourth year classics student overheard me and came over to tell me it was bollocks. As he crisply pointed out, if you have four awesome parties, beat the nearest college to a pulp on the rugby field and pull twice you’ll be waiting for fifth week next term like a crack addict on a street corner. To parallel that into Val d’Isere parlance, if you hit the mountain every day and ski some of the waist deep powder we have brewing at the moment, party hard every night and sail out of Dicks with something suggestible at the end of the night you’re going to be hoping it’s Groundhog Day and you get to do it again tomorrow.
Let’s be honest, if you can’t have fun and enjoy yourself in Val d’Isere you’re the kind of person that makes Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh look like the life and soul of the party. This microcosm in which we find ourselves is immune to the funk London is in because of the economy, ignores the exchange rates and financial markets bouncing up and down like a whore’s drawers and reduces the whole thing to a quintessentially atavistic existence: skiing and partying with a modicum of work thrown in. I know some of you will have felt some twinge of agreement with the idea of mid-season blues. If your awesome existence here has somehow become staid and mundane, simply smack yourself in the face, dump the two bars of chocolate you were going to split with your flatmate as you sat around talking about feelings in the bin and head out for half a dozen jaegerbombs determined to tear the town a new one.
I’ve done the office cubicle thing for seven years so I know what twenty five days holiday a year feels like. In a few short weeks I’ll be returning to it. I can assure you that the prospect of going back to shouting at four computer screens as opposed to spending my days in a powder playground and my nights searching for someone old enough to understand but young enough not to know better is not in the least bit tempting. It should be the prospect of this existence being an inevitability that drags down your mood as the season winds down, not the fact that you’ve had two and a half months in vacationland and still have the best two and a half months to go. Get depressed after the last funi and not before.
Ultimately you may still be rooted to the existence of mid-season doldrums, Smurfs, Care Bears and the like. If you really need convincing give me a call, we’ll party like it’s week nine and I’ll show you how awesome your life is. There is the possibility that you might be the kind of person people emigrate to avoid, but if you’re that kind of social hand-grenade you’ve got way bigger problems than mid-season blues. If you still need cheering up consider this: you’re a Siamese twin joined at the waist. Your twin brother is gay. You’re not, but you only have the one ass. Feel better now?
