Close thing...

Just got back from an hour's bike ride around the county lanes that fringe the Blenheim estate. The sun kept coming out between fat white clouds, and there were darker clouds at a lower height...little trains of them rushing across the sky in the strong wind. Pedalling into the wind, I could sense the final traces of last night's Stella Artois and shredded chilli beef sweating out through my pores (ick). Just as I got back, it started to tip down with rain: it's beating on the velux at the moment.

Northern hemisphere tilt

A couple of people in the last week have said how they've felt their mood starting to lift - "something to do with the quality of the sunlight", one of them said (or maybe it was *me* that said that?). Anyway... (Bugger, can't write for toffee today: this stuff is squeezing out of my brain like the last reluctant squidge at the crimped end of a toothpaste tube.)

Anyway, I'm sure there's a set of obvious technical explanations for this sun/mood-lift feenominon: like all the other animals, we take our light cues from the angle of the sunlight, the elevation above the horizon and so on. There must be something hardwired that kicks in and says "hey, the sun's consistently 30 degrees above the horizon for 90 minutes a day! get ready to breed - come on!" (Something like that - I'm not a doctor, for Christ's sake. Whatever it is, it's better than that stolid winter misery. I wish I'd paid more attention to those kids' TV programmes that explained celestial mechanics using a melon, and orange, an apple, a cherry, several pieces of string, and a large pool of light in a darkened studio. But I didn't, and now I'm too lazy and fluff-headed to learn.

The rain's stopped, too - I've got a skylight full of bright blue, and a dazzling lozenge of light on the white-painted wall. Nice.