The ongoing war in Ukraine, monsters like Trump, Putin, Johnson and Farage pushing lies and division, the spiralling costs of living driving the most vulnerable further and further into poverty.
I’ve got to be frank – sometimes you just have to unplug from this hell world, don’t you? So, this week, a little joy.
We’ve returned home after three months in California to discover – it’s SPRING. Well, it was for a day or two after we arrived, with temperatures a balmy 63 degrees down here in the south-east of England. (OK, around 17 Celsius for youngsters and non-Americans.)
Then, overnight, it plunged down to freezing. But still, the daffodils are all out, bunnies are capering on the verges, the clocks have gone forward and The Masters is next week. So, spring it is.
Recently, this time of year always brings a certain feeling for me. I want to get home to Scotland. More specifically, to Irvine, down on the Ayrshire coast, where I grew up.
I want to see my mum. I want to walk on the beach. Go for coffee at Gro down at the harbour. I want to look longingly at the patch of grass across the road where the Magnum Leisure Centre stood for over 40 years.
I want to go for a drink in The Turf, where I sipped my first thoroughly illegal pint in the winter of 1982, where we’d spend the Friday and Saturday nights of our youth: me and Keith and Graham and Tiny and Larry and Basil and Gordon and Rab and Kevin and all the Andys.
I want to play golf at Glasgow Gales and Ravenspark, where I learnt the game from my dad a lifetime ago. I want to see the cherry trees in their brief, beautiful full blossom on Golffields Road, just round the corner from my mum’s house.
I always get this feeling at the beginning of spring but this year, perhaps having to do with spending so long on the other side of the world, it is especially acute.
Trust me – it wasn’t always this way.
I was the kind of teenager who couldn’t wait to get out of the town they grew up in, who was desperate to stretch their legs and run away, to Glasgow, then London and then to Los Angeles.
In my 20s and 30s, you’d have had to coax me back to Irvine with fizzing cattle prods and blistering pokers.
And then, in the last decade or so, that all started to change. Now, every spring, as Easter approaches, I am filled with an almost painful longing for home. The Germans call it “sehnsucht”. The Portuguese say “saudade”. But it is the Welsh who have the best word for it – “hiraeth”.
I always took the term to simply mean homesickness. But it’s actually a bit more complicated than that. It also contains strands of nostalgia and longing, interlaced, in the words of travel writer Lily Crossley-Baxter, with “a subtle acknowledgment of an irretrievable loss – a unique blend of place, time and people that can never be recreated”.
And there is an ache, a sorrow that comes with all of this. A kind of grief. Because, no matter how long you stare at that patch of grass, the Magnum is never rising back up through the earth.
I only have the memories of the things I did in there: Playing Asteroids with my wee brother. Learning to swim in the huge pool.
Stumbling around the ice rink in rented “purple panther” skates, ELO’s Mr Blue Sky or Elvis Costello’s Accidents Will Happen blaring out in the chill air, these songs placing us in the late 1970s, when I was on the cusp of becoming a teenager.
I’ll never again walk those fairways with my father, dead and gone almost 30 years now.
And there are friends and family who will never raise their glass to me in The Turf bar again. Larry, Keith, Gary. All gone.
But my mum is still there. The beach is still there. The Turf and the golf courses are still there. And there are still friends. So, I’ll be heading home this Easter, my heart full of the hiraeth, to fill up on the things that really matter.
In our current hell world, I hope you and yours get the chance to do the same.
