This feels odd. And remarkable. And it’s left me feeling rather giddy. Yes, as of this moment, I’m approaching a state that feels suspiciously like happiness. I can’t say exactly why that is the case. It would be indiscreet and a tad caddish. But I can say with confidence that the fact spring has sprung has played a part.

For years, that wasn’t the case. I’d spend most of spring torturing bulbs – of the floral variety that is. I have no issues with electric bulbs – although I have been guilty of shoeing the odd lamp…just so they don’t get ideas – but back to the flora. Hyacinth and daffodils still wilt when I pass to this day, such was the ferocity of my pogrom. To them, I am a bogeyman. A cack-handed, over-watering, bogeyman.

Colin Montgomery says, “Hello Easter, hello clouds, hello little tweety birds!” Well, sort of...

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Similarly, hard-boiled eggs now flinch in my presence. They still remember the infamous Townhill Primary incident of 1978 when, while observing the Easter tradition, I ruthlessly defaced one of their number with a kaleidoscopic livery leaving it, quite literally, shell-shocked. It was supposed to be a Russian doll design.  But it ended up looking like a clumsy ovoid Kandinsky, daubed by arthritic bats.

Then there was the month of May. I hated May. It was just sort of there, like the smelly, spotty guy at the back of double physics. In fact for two years I took out a restraining order on May. By law, it wasn’t allowed to come within 50 feet of me. Clearly the law held no sway with May. Every year, it thumbed its nose at justice and enveloped me in its Mayness. Usually around May. But once in October too.  Yet now, I’ve committed to spending most of May being pathetically cheerful.

Oh, and let’s not forget the whole fecundity thing. You know, baby animals, tweeting birds, blossoming trees and all that crap. The stuff that has naïve life-lovers waxing lyrical, to the point of extreme punchability. In years past, their incessant glassy-eyed optimism simply drove me on to ever more cynical simmering. Yet suddenly, now, birdsong turns me into a smiling dope. Weird.

Sweaty clown’s shoe
April Fools was another weeping pustule on the face of spring. By the time you read this, the day of clunking japery, creaky spoof news stories and hilarious themed marketing stunts will be over. Now, I’m strangely indifferent. Not so a few years back. Then, I’d have gladly kicked April Fools Day to Thurso and back – stopping only to force feed it pulped joke books and a sweaty clown’s shoe.

St George’s Day was another bunch of cock that made spring a struggle. Not because I’m anti-English at all. Most of them are tolerable. I just disagree with the idiocy of patron saints full stop. It’s an open goal for thick symbol-loving twats to feel preposterously proud of their imagined nationhood. There are no nations. There is, as Ned Beatty so wonderfully points out in his fulminating firecracker of a speech in the genius film that is Network, only a college of corporations. And dollars. And pounds. And shillings. And sheckles.

Yet where once I was mad as hell about the chauvinistic bombast of Saint George’s Day, I am now quite happy to let dragon-haters do their worst and wave their national flags all day long. The flags made by kids with rickets in China.

And I can’t exempt the messy equine circus that is the Grand National from this twisted love-in. Every year, without fail, bookies nationwide come together to gather at nightfall in a forest, disrobe (but for chequered trilbies) and worship at an altar fashioned from the scrunched up betting tickets of one C. Montgomery. I am their feckless deity, their shaman of shit luck, and their holy goofball.

Infallible spread bets
In other words, they take me to the cleaners every single April.

Previously, the failure of my supposedly infallible spread-bets would have seen me steaming like horse-cack. You could have spread me on the roses. But now, oddly, I find myself preparing to gladly squander my monies. And in the unlikely event I actually win something on the nags, I’ll happily donate half to charity.

When will this new-found positivity end? Well, once the prescription ends no doubt. But seriously, I could get quite used to this whole upbeat lark. Only trouble is I know the contents of my noggin far too well. Icebergs and sandbanks abound. I can never relax at the rudder. Nor bumble on the bridge. This ship is still far from flat calm. Yet, for now, just for a while, I’ll enjoy the sailing.

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Illustration by Bernie Reid, who’s got a nice little exhibition up in Diner7 right now, do pop by for a gander at some top quality Graffiti prints.