Blue Monday

Tomorrow is the day: Blue Monday. I heard something about its history once, no idea if it’s true, but it sounds believable: a travel agency asked a psychologist which day of the year would be the best day to advertise booking a summer holiday. Their diagnosis was the third Monday of any new calendar year. That should be the most depressing day of the year, due to a variety of reasons: it’s cold, it gets light late in the morning and then dark again early in the afternoon, and people are usually starting to fail their new year’s resolutions a few weeks in. Half the western world has started to get irritated with their scale and have decided that going to the gym three times a week does, in fact, take too much time. This past December, Jacqueline and I went to a concert of Dutch singer Trijntje Oosterhuis in the Dominicus Church in Amsterdam. She’s a beautiful singer, we had a wonderful night, and somewhere during her set, we heard an elderly lady whisper in her husband’s ear: “Oops, I think I just quietly passed some gas, what do I do?”, and her husband answered: “Get new batteries for your hearing aids.”

You see, as long as I can overhear little things like these, Blue Mondays will never get to me. And about those new year’s resolutions: I already know they’re not going to work out, so I don’t let it surprise me. I don’t mean this in a pessimistic way, but I am a firm believer that everything always ends up going way different than you thought it would go. It’s true! Even when things go how you expected them to go, then that is still surprising and therefore also different than you anticipated, if you’re still following me. (This is why Jacqueline and my daughters say I write unintelligible newsletters sometimes.) Another example: I wanted to write a nice, long blog this week, I thought I wasn’t too busy so it should surely work. And then the Amaryllis growers reached out to us and asked if we had an idea of what we would like to have this upcoming year. And then Harley, the man behind QDaffs.us, let us know he wanted to add varieties to his website, too. And then the Dahlia growers also came along and wanted to know which kinds of Dahlias they should grow for us this summer. 

Naturally, many of these lists are already finished, but before everything is confirmed, we want to check it again and make sure it’s all exactly what we want. So I put away my notebook and went back to the flowers. The Amaryllises and the Daffodils are done, I’ll show you more about the upcoming assortments in the following weeks. The Dahlias still beed some work. I’ll also tell you more about why it is important that we choose now what we want to offer next season. Dahlias go through an interesting process, I’ll make sure to show you exactly how that all works. 

QDaffs.us is live now. There are over 450 different kinds of Daffodils. Those varieties will also be available at the Fluwel Special Narcissus. Which web shop you need depends on your location, but you can always look: the new varieties are gorgeous. 

See you next week. 

Kind regards, 

Carlos van der Veek