Santa Ana Winds

I found out my Uncle Les had carked it recently. To be honest I thought he’d already have been long gone. Must have been a good old age. My Uncle Les was a sheep farmer out in the woolly wilds of Northumberland. He had a little wife who cooked for him, did his laundry and brought up their four daughters, who adored him. Les had a Border Collie called Midge who spent most of her life working and the rest out in the barn, in pup. I remember I was up at the farm one day, when the girls ran into the kitchen interrupting our tea and begged him to come and see the nest of new-born mice they had discovered near the whelping box where Midge was feeding her latest brood. I tagged along behind, struggling to keep up with his huge determined strides down the hill to the barn. Les spoke briefly and gently to Midge, and then without breaking stride, walked over to the nest and stood on it, twisting down his size 12 through the hay until it reached the gravel. He scooped up the mess of shredded mat...

  My grief counsellor was a serene, soft-spoken woman called Christine, from Blarney, County Cork. Yes, that’s what I thought too. I first met her, almost twenty years ago now. It was a huge step to take, and one that I took very reluctantly. I regarded her with deep suspicion as I began to open up, uneasily, about the daunting range of symptoms I was experiencing, from intellectual and physical lethargy, emotional meditation, loss of concentration, chronic negativity, pessimism, feelings of worthlessness, and unremitting sadness. She listened patiently to my hesitant, broken tones, as she’d learned to do; joining at length, my prologue with tender reassurance, “Low cognitive energy; persistently negative mood. Your loved ones tell you you’re irritable. You’ve lost interest in everyday life.” I nodded. “It’s what’s called ‘endogenous depression’,” she sympathised, in her seductive Irish brogue. I told her she was wrong about that; the depressed bit, I mean, and promptly ended our f...