AGREAT thing about life is that you never know what is going to happen to cheer you up. Admittedly, you never know what is going to happen to depress the hell out of you either, but no-one wants to hear of someone else's troubles when most have an elegant sufficiency of their own.
At least no-one normal wants to hear, which means discounting buyers of the misery memoirs which take up far too much space in bookshops and those who watch EastEnders. Amazing how a serial in which someone has to cry, shout or be violent at least ev
ery 30 seconds – in the interests of research, I once stop-watched an episode – has run for so long although, to be fair, I should do the same timing exercise with a football match or any recent Prime Minister's Question Time.
I could also do it for a dozen other programmes and activities on television or in the real world that would, if I let them, sink me in gloom. Churchill used to call this temporary depression "Black dog", which is good, but I prefer "Despair squid".
That comes from an episode of the 1990s Red Dwarf space sitcom which at times was (copyright my son, Tom, never one to exaggerate) comedy genius. Just as I'm amazed that something as miserable as EastEnders gets so many million viewers, I'm amazed that a series which produced so many laugh-out-loud moments has only a cult following, of which I seem to be an unlikely member.
In one of the best episodes, a giant despair squid settled on the spaceship to suck all energy, joy and optimism out of the crew, and the phrase immediately became family in-joke shorthand for having a bad day.
I also began to use it about a colleague whose heavy sigh preceded him of a morning before he slumped into a chair and groaned. It's remarkable the effect that can have on the most cheerful. Gloom descended all around and, remarkably, the lights seemed to dim. God knows what the EastEnders script-writers' room must be like.
As it happens, after a down-day last week – man flu threatening and, 24-hour insanity taking many forms, a notion to re-read Madame Bovary, one of the world's most depressing books – what cheered me next morning also took place in space. It was the efforts by astronauts to make repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope at the same time as I was trying to repair a small leak in a waste water pipe. As I struggled with plumbers' tape, sealant and a piece of wood while urging those to whom it might concern not to run the hot tap or empty the sink, I heard of astronauts in 400lb spacesuits wedged against telescope housing to avoid drifting into space while trying not to drop tools costing several million dollars each.
An earth-bound team leader said he was five years older than when he came to work that morning, then an astronaut said: "We had to use brute force to tear it off. It was like trying to repair my car at home – massive frustration and best left to the professionals."
Three things then happened. I burst out laughing, dropped the tape in the drain and went to phone a plumber.
