Nangle Natters: Bad-tempered blues

I am in a foul mood. It doesn’t happen often but this week has seen me more angry – and by that I mean angry more frequently, not like on a scale of one to ten – than I remember being for quite some time. Which means that my patience with others is at ground zero.

The good thing about foul-temperedness being a rarity is that generally my friends and colleagues are treating it with some good humour. I have become a curiosity as my usual sunny demeanor erupts into cusses and intense critiques. I do know, however, that this indulgence has a shelf life.

I have become a curiosity as my usual sunny demeanor erupts into cusses and critiques

I was talking, relatively calmly, with my mother and we remembered the old ‘Cross Patch’ nursery rhyme as sound advice in dealing with a bad mood. “Cross Patch, draw the latch, sit by the fire and spin. Take a cup, and drink it up, then let your neighbours in.” In other words, take a moment away from the world and chill the heck out on your own until you feel better. I’m a great believer in this – and it does mean that my pals don’t get pushed too far and stop finding me funny and start finding me just aggressive and annoying. At least I hope it does.

In the same way that someone storming down the street, barging the rest of the world out of the way is likely to make whoever gets barged not in the best of moods, I usually try to keep my ill tempers to myself. The last thing anyone needs is to recover a good mood, only to catch their own bad mood back on the boomerang from someone they’d earlier upset. So isolation is my best policy. Who said you can’t learn anything from nursery rhymes. Now I just need to know how to spin…