In defence of February

Everyone has their own most loved and hated months. While for Chaucer, Browning and others April was a time of joyful rebirth, it was of course for Eliot ‘the cruellest month’. Still, February tends to get a bad rap from everybody. It manages to be both the shortest and longest month of the year. In theory the days are getting longer, and yet the darkness of the previous night and the next morning blur, making for a grim nocturnal existence. It doesn’t matter if you’re a night owl or a morning lark, in February you’re commuting from work in the dark.

Still, better than midwinter isn’t it? Hardly. The glamorous, festive part of the season is a mulled wine-blurred distant memory. And while January is tough, there is at least a back-to-school feeling in the air and a buoyancy from new year’s resolutions not yet broken. There is something nice about the ascetic regimen of that spartan month, like a bracing Boxing Day walk after turkey excess.