Ask Virginia Ironside

QEvery year I dread the spring. I am prone to depression and it always hits me worst around March and April, when everyone else is full of the joys of the coming year. Once summer comes, it lessens and gets better every month, until spring hits again. I gather this is not uncommon. Do you have any ideas of how to beat it? Barbara

AYou’re absolutely right. The suicide rates peak in the spring, and no one really knows why. It could be that it’s a change in the light that upsets us. Or it could be that, if you’re a depressive, the gap between your mood and the mood of other people, full of joy and hope, becomes much wider. As a bit of a gloombird myself, I know the sight of a crocus or a daffodil fills me with irrational horror and despair.

But there is another thought. Could your depression be connected to a very old bereavement? It’s known as ‘anniversary grief’. Did one of your parents die in the spring? Or someone close to you? It’s been shown that we’re all vulnerable around these anniversaries, even if we think we’ve got over them It’s more likely we’ll get ill, as well. I think you’re halfway to beating it by anticipating it, though. I’ve found that writing in my diary, ‘Expect to feel very low,’ really does help, because then I feel more in control of the dark feelings. See if this helps.

I don’t want romance

QI’m being wooed by a man I met at bridge – he’s 73 and I’m 70. I like him, but the problem is that he’s so romantic. He’s always leaving love poems on my windscreen and staring at me and saying how beautiful I am. Am I churlish to find this rather off-putting? My female friends say they would die to have an admirer like mine, but I’m put off, I’m afraid.

AName and address supplied Men are notoriously more romantic than women. And I don’t blame you for feeling rather spooked by this man’s behaviour, particularly at his age when experience should have taught him to know better. I think the reason for your discomfiture is that you feel he doesn’t actually adore you, but some idealised version of you, some perfect female who perhaps exists in his imagination rather than reality.

A man making you a cup of tea when you feel tired is far more appealing, in my books, than a man who brings you chocolates and flowers. I’d give this bloke a wide berth. He seems like a fantasist and I think you’d go mad if you got closer to him. And there’s always the fear that, once the penny drops and he finds that you’re not the saint he imagines, he might become resentful and angry.

Why can’t I hula?

QMy granddaughter brought her hula hoop round last week and I offered to give her a demonstration, having been a good hula-hooper in my youth. Unfortunately, I was completely unable to master it. Collapse of stout granny! But I thought these skills never left you – like riding a bicycle? Andrea Wilkinson by email

AI’m afraid this isn’t true. The phrase ‘use it or lose it’ comes to mind, and obviously you’ve lost it. Have you tried painting a ceiling recently, for example? Or skinny-dipping in the dark? Or, indeed, riding a bicycle, a skill not nearly as easy as it was unless you’ve always done it? It’s due, in part, to oldies’ balance not being what it was, and their being unable to turn their heads round quite as far as they used to be able to, making it less easy to spot traffic coming from behind.

READERS RESPOND

Insomnia cures Many readers wrote in with their tips for getting to sleep. There were strictures to give up caffeine, take more exercise, get the app Sleep Genius, take Rescue Remedy, count back from 99 (you rarely get into the teens apparently), listen to audio books, eat bowls of bran with milk and manuka honey, and listen to the World Service.

I’m willing to try them all, except the last. These days, if I turn on the World Service at 3am, I always seem to stumble on items about FGM or child soldiers being brutally forced to mutilate and rape their mothers, which, far from sending me to sleep, reduce me to a gibbering wreck. Kindness predates Christianity To the lady who ‘doesn’t do God’, I’d ask if it wouldn’t be ‘good manners’ for both parties to be respectful of the other’s beliefs? Your statement that ‘our whole Western society is pretty much based on a Christian ethos – be kind to each other…’ is inaccurate. The ethos of treating others as you would like to be treated yourself was extant millennia before Christ, and has been proven by neuroscientific research to be an instinctive behaviour. Diana Nisbet, Western Australia

Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk – I will answer every email that comes in; and let me know if you would like your dilemma to be confidential