Long life | 24 January 2013

I am writing on what is known as Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year. Or so the Daily Mail tells me. The newspaper claims that Blue Monday was invented by a psychologist called Cliff Arnall, who seven years ago identified the third Monday in January as the day on which people are at their gloomiest. ‘He came up with a scientific formula based on the length of time until next Christmas, holiday debt, and the likelihood of giving up New Year resolutions,’ it says. The remoteness of next Christmas might seem, on the contrary, to be something to cheer about; and failure to keep New Year resolutions could have been easily avoided by following my example and not making any, as could ‘holiday debt’ by following the example of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge. But this nonsensical anniversary survives, like so many artificial occasions (Father’s Day springs to mind), because of its propensity to make money for somebody.