i hate this time of year

Today, Tuesday the 21st of June, is the summer solstice.

The summer solstice is the longest day of the year (well, it's 24 hours long, just like every other day - I mean it has the most daylight) and it therefore marks one of my worst days of the year. Well, in terms of sleep, that is.

I believe it also marks the point when summer starts to get properly hot - the period when I'm traditionally the least comfortable, though this year I obviously weigh about a fifth less than I have done in previous years, so hopefully it will be a bit more bearable Certainly I've found spring to be quite chilly, but I also think it has generally been quite cool compared to seasonal averages.

But the point is that with it being the longest day, that means the sun doesn't set until very late at night. And of course, because it doesn't get instantly dark when the sun sets, it's still quite light until getting on for midnight. This lateness of setting is also further exaggerated by us being on British Summer Time.

Now I appreciate that this has many advantages and certainly, as an early riser, it's nice to get up and it be light to a degree, though to be frank, how early it becomes light is also a problem, because my body seems to react to the light by waking me up. So it becomes an attack from both ends - when I go to bed it's still light out and it gets light at about 4, so I sometimes wake up.

I mean surely it can't be right that I go to bed at 10 and when I switch my bedside lamp off, sufficient light streams in around the curtain edges to make it feel like I've gone to bed in the middle of the afternoon? That's got to be wrong.

Still, at least from here on the nights start getting longer.

Tomorrow I'll be posting up my usual DVD rental review, but after that I'm actually off on holiday for a couple of days. My landlord is on holiday and I'm going to use the opportunity to do some shed sorting out stuff.

Hopefully I'll then be able to get a load of stuff on e-bay - the pile in the shed seems to have grown again and I could do with generate some cash. Well, really I need to actually do something about the cash I've got locked up n unwatched DVDs and unplayed games, but then that's a continuing issue - the shed is the priority for the weekend.

Well, I say all that. I'm prewriting this and the weather forecast isn't great and my landlord traditionally doesn't have much tolerance for poor weather, so he may already have come back by the time I'm posting this!