My Very Own Sun

This morning, Saturday 7^th November 2009, I received my very own sun via Royal Mail Special delivery.

You don’t believe that the Royal Mail delivers the sunshine these days… Think hard! How often did we have sunshine? … and how often have they been on strike?...There you are! So to make sure you receive your very own you have to put in an online order. Mine was for Amazon and thanks to special delivery I got it after two days already. My little sun is small, cute and comes with a travel bag – very important these days since even in southerly holiday locations sun is not guaranteed anymore – so better take your own.

Aint it cute?

The reason why I eventually decided to invest into my own was the telly. I tend to watch too much, but this time it was good I did. A doctor was interviewed regarding a common condition which patients complain about in winter: Tired, hungry for carbos, grumpy down to depression. Well I always thought that is how one feels and wouldn’t have necessarily thought about bothering my GP with it. And then I remembered another telly incident. I watched Stephen Fry explaining his depression, and he, being an author and man of the word in general, described it so vividly that at some point I blasted out: ‘Oh that feeling I know!’ … and Detlef – dear hubby, that is – almost fell off his chair. He never had experienced any of this, found it rather interesting that others do, but could not relate to it the least bit, while I was glued to the screen.

Well, depression comes in degrees and it seems that some people have it coming in waves, and some have it coming from certain events. And it seems that people in a depressive phase seem to hide away, so nobody knows, really. Only Detlef knows me when I am down, sleeping all day, or watching telly. I can’t write, well I can, but it’s all rubbish and lacking wit. I am not creative, and if I try – theoretically depression is to give in when the victim is doing something nice – so if I try, I am so clumsy that everything turns into a listless design, smudged and brittle. Photos are out of focus because my eyes are slow and heavy… I’m just useless in phases like those, thus the nice theory mentioned above is herewith put to rest.

Age helps in a way because it made me more experienced. At work I know my ways and focus on the stuff that doesn’t need a lot of thinking, and when I have to meet people I hope I can fake it well enough. I seem to be a lighter case and usually it’s gone after a couple of days.

However, the interesting thing is that I thought it's normal and seeing this doctor talking about it made me realise that it is not! They even invented a fancy acronym for it: SAD – Seasonal Affective Disorder

More interestingly even, there seems to be a simple cure – which is to get your own sun. I even had heard about it before some 15 years ago. My in-laws got a rather big device, something like an A3 desk lamp with several fluorescent tubes and depending on the number of tubes, one has to sit in front for 20 minutes to an hour daily. Back then it was a word-of-mouth thing like taking some herbal remedies for all sorts of things. These lights were expensive and bulky so I didn’t consider it further and forgot all about it.

Now I instantly used my geeky husband to research the matter properly and a couple of hours later I found an email with three links describing the most suitable products. Two were still the bulky type using power leads – oh how I hate cables, they are utterly depression enhancing – and one was the little cute less than A5 size battery operated blue light.

Firstly I love blue light. Whenever I see these blue Christmas decorations on houses I go 'Oh' and 'Ah', and given the choice of blue or red LEDs on electric devices I always would choose blue. Additionally it seems to put less strain on the eyes as some people get headaches from the fluorescent tubes. Well, we have to see about that. And we will have to see if it works at all. It is supposed to help against winter blues and jet lag as well.

Main task now is to get it working, it has to charge for an initial eight hours – bahhh – later it’s only four or so, but I briefly had it on using the mains and it is … bright … and blue … so that will have to be it for now. It’s said that after a couple of weeks one is supposed to feel a difference… Well, until then folks: In good homeopathic tradition of 'like cures like' let's try to fight 'The Blues' with somethig blue!