The Law Of Sod

Something has gone wrong with the Season Race.

This always happens. I wax lyrical about something - gush my little Pollyanna socks off, as I`m horribly prone to - and then it spins around, sticks its middle finger up at me and runs away laughing. Every time: no matter what it is. If I publicly declare trust in a hairdresser, she`ll automatically give me an orange mullet. If I announce that I`ve found the perfect moisturiser, it will bring me out in hives. If I say the children in my school are lovely I`ll turn round three minutes later to find them doing an unflattering impression of the way I walk, and if I confess that my writing is going well, I`ll discover that every single word I`ve written is nonsense. The minute I announce to anyone I`m in love, the object of my affections changes their minds; the minute I say I feel fanastic and healthy, I get the flu; the minute I say I want to go to a country, some kind of war breaks out there. Oh she`s gone and done it now, the Universe immediately says, and goes out of its way to prove me wrong and make me look like some kind of Anne of Green Gables on acid. This, it adds, just for the record, is called Sod`s Law. It particularly likes you, because you tempt it so openly and so damn often. Get a grip, Hollyanna.

And yet, I never learn. Logically, of course, I should just announce that the world and everything in it is crap and heading towards further inevitable crapness and be proved either right or pleasantly surprised, but you can`t fake that kind of thing. The Universe will know that I`m secretly optimistic that everything will turn out perfectly in the end, and it`ll call my bluff. Because I honestly believe that everything will. Eventually. As soon as I stopped getting punished for believing that. As soon as the Universe starts behaving the way I got told it would in all the fairytales I read when I was little, and sends perfect weather and haircuts and love and health and students.

Thus, I think I may have asked for this: the immediate death of Autumn. The minute I wrote about how perfect it was - taking the baton so neatly from Summer, moving so elegantly towards Winter - it killed itself. Mid-race, somewhere in between steps two and three. And, in the swan dive towards its 2010 end, it just managed to lob the baton towards Winter before it fell face forward into the dirt.

It`s freezing. It`s raining. It`s cloudy. The temperature - so beautifully temperate for about four days - plummetted overnight, and I woke up shivering in my cotton sheet and trying to work out where I put all my jumpers and a duvet that isn`t at the back of a cupboard, covered in mould. One week ago, I was in a vest and shorts: I am now in a jumper and tights. Autumn didn`t even bother trying: it took one look at 2010 and said Sod this, I can`t be fagged, and committed seasonal suicide. "If it doesn`t come back, I`m blaming you," a friend emailed me this morning. "Just so you know. You were way too quick to start telling everyone how great it was."

Thus; I am now announcing that I have changed my mind. Autumn was shit. Summer was too hot, and winter is going to be foul. Pissy, freezing, lonely and miserable. Alright? Just so you know. I`m going to hate every second of it. I`m going to wish I was anywhere but in a Japanese winter. I`m going to wish that it was summer, or spring, in any other country. Japan and its suicidal seasons can screw itself.

Okay? That should do it.

I expect it to be sunny and pretty and Autumnal from first thing tomorrow. Or however long it takes before the Universe reads this blog and totally ruins it again.