DO you know what day it is? What month, what season? Not if you're in the middle of a supermarket, you won't.

The shelves groan with Hallowe'en goodies, but at the same time there are mince pies and hot cross buns. There are also strawberries and summer pudding too.

No wonder we're getting confused and stressed.

Bad enough that Christmas starts so early. Instead of a bright spot in the middle of the winter, it now just gets us all depressed from late summer onwards. This is meant to be fun?

Never mind the pressure to spend too much too soon. ("Well what am I going to get YOU for Christmas?" snapped a woman at her elderly mother in the middle of York last week - barely the middle of October) or the way Christmas has snowballed from a bit of festive fun to a mammoth ordeal of getting and spending, eating and drinking that can never live up to its expectations.

Nearly as bad is the way in which it has tipped our year out of balance, upsetting the rhythm of the seasons.

Medics and therapists of all types say that a natural rhythm is vital to our lives. If we lose it, things start to go wrong. It's why we get jet lag. It's why shift workers are more likely to get ill. It's why irregular lives send our bodies into stress and chaos. There used to be a gadget which would measure your own personal biorhythms. But we have lost many of the natural rhythms of life.

I swim at dawn, iron at midnight, work any old time and shop in the early hours. It makes life easier in the short-term, but I wonder. Many of us have lost Sunday as a day of rest and are busy, busy, busy with no discernible break. And as for the rhythm of the seasons, the sense of the year turning, that's blown out of the window. When you can get strawberries at Christmas, mince pies in September and hot cross buns all year round, no wonder we're lost.

You can choose not to start your Christmas shopping until November, but you can't avoid the hype and it's difficult to avoid the pressure - the feeling that yes, maybe, you should be Christmas shopping already, stocking up on chocolates and wrapping paper.

If we filled our house with clocks all showing different times and alarms going off randomly, we would soon feel jumpy and unsettled, unsure of where we were in the day.

And the chainstores and supermarkets are just doing a similar sort of thing on a much larger scale. It can't be good for us.

Meanwhile in Canada, a group of self-styled retail terrorists have launched a campaign called L'anti-Noel avant le temps - No Christmas until it's time. They're planning action against stores who put up their decorations before December.

Sounds good to me.

So don't be panicked into spending more than you want, sooner than you need. Refuse to be bullied. Retail terrorists of the world unite! You have everything to gain - especially your sanity. And nothing to lose but your credit card bill .

THE rich are different from the rest of us, aren't they? I mean, when trouble strikes, most of us can find room for family, even if it means doubling up, camp beds on the landing, sleeping bags on the sofa or whatever. When my sister's house deal fell through, she just moved back in with my parents for six months, bringing with her a husband, a toddler, a baby and a totally neurotic Jack Russell.

Sick grannies, elderly aunties, boomeranging young adults know, really, that when the chips are down, you can rely on your family.

Unless, of course, you happen to be the Spencers.

When her marriage collapsed, Princess Diana wanted a bolt hole and, understandably, you'd think, she thought of her family home, Althorp. After all, her brother. Earl Spencer had a massive stately home, a spare wing or two, plenty of houses, a couple of cottages and the occasional stable block. No need there to roll a sleeping bag up each morning or join a queue for the bathroom. No problem, you would have thought.

Yes there was. First of all he offered to rent his sister a house - rent - mind you, at the bargain price of £12,000 instead of £20,000. How generous. And then he withdrew even that offer because he thought it would inconvenience his wife and family and threaten their privacy.

Inconvenience? He should try sharing his bedroom with a toddler and a neurotic Jack Russell.

Princess Diana never went back home to live. Presumably her brother rented out the house for £20,000.

And that's why the rich have money and the rest of us haven't.

AT the front and back of our house are some splendid horse chestnut trees. Every year we are used to small boys clambering up into the branches, throwing sticks up, doing everything they can to get the conkers and staggering away with bags full of them.

Not this year.

Heaps of lovely glossy conkers lie open on the grass, ignored and unwanted. Seems an awful shame that I'm tempted to collect them all myself.

Don't small boys - or girls - play conkers any more? And if not, why not?

COLERIDGE took laudanum and saw visions of Xanadu and Kubla Khan. Dylan Thomas knocked back whiskies and created a whole universe of words that inspired even when they didn't make much sense. Robert Graves wrote fuelled by love and sex and the Beat Poets were either stoned out of their skulls and high as kites.

And what does our Poet Laureate Andrew Motion take to inspire him? Lemsip, that's what.

And they wonder why people don't read poetry any more.....

IN all the arguments over the firemen's strike we seem to have missed a basic point. If they are too important to go on strike, then surely they are important enough to pay properly? What more needs to be said?

Published: ??/??/2002