No, Not Winnie The Pooh

By this point in my life, I've gotten used to people thinking I'm kinda weird. They think I'm weird for lots of reasons, like:

1. I don't like hot drinks.

2. I don't enjoy clubbing or going to pubs, and never have.

3. I don't watch any soaps.

And I understand most of them, because they're all ways into life, you know? Two of those things are stuff people build their lives around. "What did you do at the weekend" nearly always means "how much drinking did you at a pub or a club?", and it's a very familiar refrain. I know, because I've had to try and awkwardly get around it a million times with things like "oh...er...I went...to somewhere. It was orsum." Instead of the truth, which would be "I ate a million midget gems and watched a thousand episodes of Parks and Recreation".

You can't tell the truth when that's it. But worse than this, is a discovery I made many moons ago. You can't tell the truth about hot drinks, either. You can't say you don't like tea or coffee, because then people stop as though you flicked an alarm labelled ABNORMAL, and next thing you know you're getting chased by torch wielding villagers.

But to come to the very essence of my long winded point: the same thing happens when I mention that I prefer winter, to summer.

Like non-tea drinking, it's the very epitome of social pariah-dom. Suddenly I'm a hunchbacked weirdo who people fear to gaze upon, lest I should shift into an even less pleasing shape. I take on many forms, apparently. Avert your eyes, children. She hates summer!

And it's true. I do. I hate everything about summer. And I don't do it to be cool and different, I swear to God! I'm not cool and different. I wear cardigans and watch Will and Grace. That's not cool and different. And my reasons for hating summer are equally as dismal like:

1. Urgh, what's that big ball of heat in the sky, trying to rape my entire body all at the same time? Urgh, I'm dying. I'm melting. Help me.

2. Oh, what's that you say? The publishing industry unofficially kind of shuts up shop in the summer? Oh well isn't that marvellous! I LOVE summer.

3. I fucking don't.

4. There's nothing on the telly. Nothing. Yeah, that's right- I live in Britain so we don't get True Blood here until January. Thanks a lot, television. I thought you were on my side.

5. There is no Christmas in summer, and Christmas rules. Yeah- that's how uncool I am. I think Christmas rules.

I think winter rules. I love the way everything looks, so cool and still and gleaming. I love the way snow looks on things, as though it wanted to draw a veil over everything ugly and mechanical and make it soft and lovely. Stark and new. I want everything to be stark and new, like the world after some terrible event that wipes nearly everyone off the planet.

Except for me. And maybe Christian Bale, naturally.

That's what winter really is- a fresh new start. Spring pretends to be, but it's lying. By the time Spring gets going things have already started, they're already in motion, you can't go back. And it just torments me with the threat of summer around the corner, anyway.

But winter never threatens me with anything. Except the occasional accident on slippy ground and even that I manage to avoid most of the time, because I'm rarely wandering around in the winter wonderland. I'm just looking at it, and being kept safe in the middle of it, like a little bear inside a frosty cocoon.

I love winter. It makes me a little bear!