A Hibernation Survived
How To Swallow The Sun When No-One Is Looking
I really, really am not a winter person, to the point that I have become fetishistic about it: I actively have to psych myself up for the days between the 21st of March and the 21st of June, when the Southern Hemisphere tumbles towards its longest night. Therapy sessions are booked in advance; my personal trainer is warned to spare me no mercy; emergency episodes of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt are kept in my Netflix queue. Being an insomniac who hates getting out of bed on the best of days, winter mornings conjure my soul into a bitchy hybrid of Eeyore and Gollum. I make sure I take leave in June or July. I am unusually happy after St John’s Eve because I know then, for sure, the days are getting longer. Winter darkness has made me so miserable in the past that I can only write about it now, now that I’m sure spring has segued into summer.
Living in Cape Town doesn’t help much if you associate Africa with sunshine. I tend not to do well when the sun only rises after 8. Since my job requires me to be at work at 7:30, I drive from May to August to and from work in the dark, tortured in knowing there are oceans and forests and mountains outside drawing visitors from around the world, even as the African winter tries its best to be bleak. (I doubt I’d ever survive in Scandinavia. The scariest thing about the Swedish vampire movie Låt den rätte komma in was the polar darkness it was set in— that and the ugly architecture of the housing estate where the story plays out). During my two years in the UK I completely avoided winter by flying south every December and January. Mozambique. Durban. Even Charlize Theron’s hometown. Anything but the dark.)
I was thus delighted when a routine set of blood tests revealed my Vitamin D level was “significantly deficient”. I hardly registered my cholesterol had risen or my Hepatitis B vaccine’s titre had dropped (necessitating a painful booster shot)… no, no, no, everything could now be solved by taking a bright purple pill that looks like an obese Smartie. It’s 50 000 units of active cholecalciferol so potent you need a prescription for it and only take once a week. It’s become something of a fad; pharmacies on the peninsula are frequently running out of stock.
Apart from its celebrated role in regulating calcium (and hence bone development) Vitamin D is also involved with mood and circadian rhythms. Because I work under perpetual artificial light and am given to reposting cat pictures on Facebook at 10 pm, my own circadian rhythm has, over many years of night shifts, devolved into a lopsided 13/8 polka composed by John Cage. I’m cursed with a night-owl personality that struggles to fit into the dreaded Pollyanna “early to bed early to rise” lifestyle WASPy Western civilization insists upon.
How I miss varsity days, when you could study like a demon between the shamanic hours that fall between midnight to 3 am, sleep through the first lectures of the day and yet function fully across all other time zones. I spent most of third-year Pharmacology slumped in a stupor at the back of the lecture hall — not because the subject was boring (it isn’t) — but because the lectures took place between 8 and 9 am.
Forget three in the morning, eight is the actual witching hour, for one can only understand the true nature of person by observing them just before their caffeine kicks in. Even as many of us lay faceplanted and drooling on our textbooks—they were just the right size to be a travel pillow—our young brains somehow absorbed the Gregorian chant of molecules intoned by the lecturers. Having to revisit the subject for my primary specialization examinations was definitely not as easy… I shudder, remembering I wrote those monsters under darkening skies.
In my hobby as storyteller, I tend to place a lot of my characters in midnight forests; still, I do this best under African sunshine. The skeleton of this post was formed at noon in a coffee shop’s back garden, staring out at a sun-kissed Table Mountain, the trees around me a-bud with living emerald and jade. Dogs barked, people unzipped their jackets, patrons thought twice about flat whites and ordered chilled juice instead. Now, sumer is icumen in, and rapidly so: my playlists brim with synth-pop and The Beach Boys; gone for now are Radiohead and Tom Waits.
The easiest way to sort out low Vitamin D and flagging mood is to actually go outside for a few minutes each day. This is easier said than done for us worker bees. Few of us can live in those shiny happy worlds summoned by margarine or washing powder commercials. Most of us have to work, squint at toxic blue screens under fluorescent lights and remember to floss.
I won’t lie; I was thrilled to be offered sunshine in a pill. My little hypochondriac self is easily wooed by the placebo effect. I’m not sure if it was replenishing the actual deficiency or the half-assed winter we admittedly had, but I felt better within a few days. I waited, patiently as David in Psalm 40, for the solstice to unseat me. Instead, we ended up landing in a steaming 30-degree Durban as we drove to the Drakensberg for our annual escape. The only personal tragedy was that the iPod wasn’t recognized by the rental car’s sound system. (June 21 is also my wife’s birthday, so there’s always that to take away the sting of the solstice.)
Which takes me to this moment, where I’ve interrupted my musings to take a walk by the ocean. I’m still taking my D3 though. Sunlight is a double-edged sword for pale bald part-time gingers like me; I’d rather take the purple Smartie in perpetuity than end up with a basal cell carcinoma on my head. As Katy Perry sings, I need SPF 45 just to stay alive.
But I can stil enjoy the sunshine. For this I’ll force myself to get up earlier on weekends and my days off, despite the cat’s protestations or the latest inanities beckoning from my Tumblr and Facebook feeds. The solstice has passed, the spring equinox gave way to that inverted, summer Halloween only the Southern Hemisphere can offer: the time of T-shirts and sunglasses and Pimms cocktails is here. Meanwhile, the local currency tumbles to new lows, the Catalan crisis gets uglier, and I ban myself from Twitter because I realise I’m self-harming a lot lately with Katie Hopkins’s invective.
After lapping up the joyous dayglo spectacle that is Thor: Ragnorok this weekend, I nearly forgot that Fenrir—the gigantic wolf that is Cate Blanchett’s lapdog while she lays waste to Asgard— swallows the sun itself in the original version of the Norse apocalypse. Given the global politcal shitstorm that currently stretches from Washington to Pretoria via Moscow, I am relieved that no such creatures have yet wandered south of the Equator.
For now, I ponder the sunshine in security.
But even on the darkest winter days we should remember what Albert Camus said: In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that is a summer you don’t need to wait — or slather on SPF 45 — for.
