ACCORDING to scientists, the most depressing day of 2005 will be next Monday. By which, of course, I mean “this Monday”. Scientists may be able to measure the relative depressingness of individual days in this brave technological century of ours, but native English-speakers have not yet reached any sort of consensus on whether “next Monday” is in two days’ or nine days’ time (which is why native English-speakers have spent the past 900 years answering the question, “Are you doing anything next Wednesday?” with the question, “Do you mean this Wednesday?”).

Aaaaanyway, I read in the Daily Mail this week: “Experts have pinpointed January 24 as the most depressing day of the year.”

Experts in what, exactly? Experts in Mondays? Surely the Wednesday experts will have something to say about this blatant attempt to hog media attention. Experts in days, generally? Cross-factional psychotherapy-cum-calendar boffins? The Daily Mail does not elucidate. It merely tells us that Cliff Arnall has come up with an equation for measuring how depressing days are — based on factors such as weather and debt levels — and that this equation shows that next Monday (this one coming up, with nothing between us and it except Sunday) will be the worst of the year.

I didn’t have to read on to know that this research had been carried out at Cardiff University. It wasn’t going to be Harvard, was it? When a newspaper story says that “research has proven that Belgian women have the most protracted orgasms in Europe”, or “scientists claim that if elephants could drive cars they would get more parking tickets than any other large mammal”, it is never at Cambridge that the research has been done. It is never Imperial College or Princeton. It is always some shonky Portakabin campus from a rainy bumhole of a town in the middle of Britain which will comply with any daft-arse publicity stunt in the hope of attracting students who can read.

Sitting there in your damp lab on some windswept Welsh industrial estate you wouldn’t develop a way of running cars on household waste or growing vegetables in the desert, would you? You would sit there thinking “God, this is depressing. This must be the most depressing day of the year. Hmmm, I wonder if that can be proven by maths. I’ll give it a go. At least it’ll be something to do until Kentucky Fried Chicken opens.”

And so this Welsh conehead came up with the formula (W+(D-d))xTQMxNA in which W is the weather, D is debt, M is general motivation levels and so on. Well, excuse me, but how do you take £1,240 away from a foggy day and multiply it by not really giving a toss if the sky falls in?

The thing about January 24, apparently, is that on this day people are encumbered by post-Christmas credit card debts, have failed to keep new year’s resolutions and are sensitive to low levels of sunshine. Furthermore, says Dr Arnall, “it is a Monday, which always makes people think ‘oh no’ as they realise that the weekend is over.” Losers. That is not depression. That is being a slack-willed, underpaid office drudge with a case of the inverted yabbadabbadoos.

Dr Arnall has completely ignored the truly important variables, such as N (still haven’t published a novel), O (so old that the only point in having children now is that you will soon need them as organ donors), DH (people with whom you once had things in common are now claiming to enjoy Desperate Housewives) and Y (ye gods, is that hair in my ears?).

To discover how depressed you are simply add these all together and square them (all proper equations have something squared in them) then multiply by August 25 (the day that the fourth Ashes Test begins, which, England having already lost the series, will be a consolation match featuring a lot of players you have never heard of) and then divide by Cardiff.

I HAD A pretty grim Wednesday looking at those pictures of British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners. Forgive me, but how exactly is joining this Army going to help Prince Harry to grow up? What is it that he is going to learn at Sandhurst? How to offend people properly? Are they going to drill him until he realises that he should have been naked under his swastika apart from his pants and a pair of flip-flops?

On the very day that the papers were reporting “Britain’s Abu Ghraib” it was revealed that Harry is to have daily drills before he goes to Sandhurst because “senior officers fear he has lost sight of the discipline required by the Army”. Au contraire. I think he has exactly the amount of discipline required by the Army. He certainly does not need any special cramming to get him up to speed with the other lads.

FINALLY, in answer to your letters about the first item, I know that Cardiff has had something of a boom of late, what with hosting televised celebrity poker tournaments and having tarmac on many of its roads. I am also aware that, as a restaurant critic, I ought to be aware of the burgeoning restaurant scene there. And, yes, I know that Cardiff University has one of the best journalism schools in the country and if I had been there (or had had any journalistic training at all) I wouldn’ t have been reduced to writing this kind of mean-minded elitist drivel full of so-called jokes that aren’t even funny. Thanks for writing.

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