DAY 25: WINTER IS RIDICULOUS

Winter is a ridiculous thing. It’s a season designed to show us how absolutely foolish we can look whilst doing the supposedly ordinary.

Like right now: it’s after 11pm and I just got home. First, I swore a few times under my breath as I walked from my car to my front door. Once I opened the door and discovered my apartment was virtually as icy as it was outside, I swore a little bit again.

Before getting into bed, I started doing my hair. Well, you’d think that by switching on my hairdryer, I started doing my hair – but nope, it was all about warming my bed up as quickly as possible to avoid the fifteen seconds of death that it takes for your bed to exit the ice age.

For a few moments, I appreciated that I lived alone and had nobody to witness this odd exercise, but I can’t say I’d care if I did have a witness. On full speed, at maximum heat, a hairdryer is gold.

In a couple of hours, I’ll need to wake up, and it will be awful. There will be the usual desperate and blind (because I won’t have my contacts in yet) search for the warm top I’ve put next to my bed. In winter, one does not simply get out of bed without getting at least partially dressed first – that would be heroic, to put it mildly.

Then, after finally getting up and standing, there will be more swearing (as you can tell, swearing is the common denominator from June to August).

The naked ‘dance’ outside the shower as the water refuses to warm up in anything under an hour is inevitable. Other simplicities that go unnoticed in summer become torture-filled in winter: rinsing your mouth with cold water, putting on spray, taking out the trash, having a glass of water and waiting by the basin like a freak before washing your hands so you can do so with warm water. That's without mentioning checking your washing for the sixth time in two days and wondering how on earth the only decent pair of jeans you have is still damp?

Then, eventually, after one last longing stare at your bed, you finally have to go outside for that treacherous walk to the car – or if you’re less spoilt than the rest of us, the bus stop.

I hate winter.