A HAIRDRESSER told me people do desperate things to their heads in February. They are so fed up of life being cold or wet or dark or whatever, they make reckless decisions and get the lot. lopped oft, or the colour changed radically to counteract a pallid face.
They sit discontentedly in their chairs before and after the transformation and even though it's not good for business, she would often suggest to them that they do something else, rather than a revolution with their hair which they might spend a year regretting and growing back to the proper shape or returning to the proper colour.
"Like what?" a gloomy woman said to her last year.
It was a puzzlement but the hairdresser was a woman of courage. "You could go to line dancing," she suggested. And the gloomy woman did.
And on the very first night, she met a man in the line as they were dancing whom she liked much better than her husband. And he tilted his hat forward and talked in a nice jokey country and western style. The gloomy woman seemed to be cheering up by the hour.
Her husband just looked up from the paper when she came home in the evenings and he said they were all cracked to be doing that sort of thing, and there was someone, somewhere making big money out of eejits buying fringed skirts and laced boots.
The children were grown up, but still mystified when they heard their mother was leaving home and moving in with the man from line dancing, their father was philosophical.
"She was always that way in February," he said. "It was a kind of a thing with her. It was as if she thought the good weather would never come again."
Apparently, he shook his head about it, accepting it as inevitable just one more of the many bad hands that life dealt. His wife walking out on him.
Whether there might also have been something wrong with their lifestyle was something he never paused to speculate about in the following months, when the good weather had come back but his wife was still with the man who tilted his hat.
The hairdresser said to me that from now on she's keeping quiet: if someone wants a head shaved to the bone in February, she'll do it. But I said no, the gloomy woman was somehow waiting for that man in the line dance. The hairdresser must not feel responsible, she must go on interfering in people's lives. Doing that is just proof that we are alive.
THIS friend of a friend, also an anti February person, gives a St Valentine's Day party every year. The simple rule that nobody who is officially or emotionally attached can attend. The theory was you wouldn't have lovebirds canoodling and making you sick, or old staid married couples nodding and patronising everyone to death. No, this was to be a gathering where the mindset of everyone was unencumbered - her phrase, and a fairly horrible one, it has to be said.
Anyway, it turned out to be a fine gathering over the years as the group changed from being twentysomething to thirtysomething, and a new decade is approaching.
Some people have dropped out because of getting involved and attached, which presumably was what a lot of it was about.
Some have moved from one state to another and back.
Everyone brings a bottle of good wine and they can ask to include new blood as well. If these people are unattached and come along bearing the requisite bottle, that's considered great too.
But last year two deceivers were at the party. Men who were certainly committed officially, and as far as their wives believed, committed emotionally as well. Dublin is a small city; they were unmasked at an early stage. Now a shadow hangs over this party.
Everyone had thought it was for real. Now, you might just as well go to a night club, they all say.
ONE of the parents at a school I know has a cookery class in her home. She has to children round each Tuesday in February and they all bring their own ingredients. They are boys and girls and they all sit and watch her do it first; then she gives them boards, dishes and part of the kitchen table each and they do it themselves.
They have made gingerbread, pizzas, cheesecake and pancakes. That was last year's repertoire.
The children and their parents would have been happy for it to go on all year, but the woman said no, it was only February, in order to beat the blues.
I said I didn't know children felt low in February.
"Who said anything about them feeling low?" she asked. She was doing it to raise her own spirits.
THERE are two men I know in Dublin who have hardly noticed February for the past 20 years.
February is quite simply the time they put their beads down and make money. They'll dig your garden, cut things back mercilessly, they'll teach your children to drive in your car, take your rubbish to the dump, they'll collect dry cleaning, stack trolleys in supermarkets, clean windows and cars, clear out garages and attics. I know they offer their services to drive drunks home, and I suspect they also drive other people's hackney cabs.
This is all on top of their day jobs, which could be described as office work.
They have regular clients; they strike a rate and work almost around the clock. But only for this one month of the year.
Why only February?
It's the month before March, stupid. And March is when you go to Cheltenham. Do you know nothing?
SINCE I left teaching and got more or less in control of my own life, I always tried to have a holiday in February. The sun on your shoulders seems to do you twice as much good in the month when you know it's going to be dark when you wake and dark while you're still at the keyboard. So today, I should be in South Africa.
I have the highest of hopes about the sun, despite the telephone interview I did for a radio station there. I was burbling on about how much I was looking forward to the heat, and the talk show host said I should bring my umbrella, which I thought was a weak but good natured weather joke, so I laughed immoderately.
Apparently it wasn't a joke at all; the rain was bucketing down outside the studio. She was giving me practical advice.
I tell you this so that you will not hate me for having gone to the sun yet again.