Traditionally, the calendar year has been broken up into four seasons. Four seasons roughly commensurate with cycles of growth, renewal and decay in nature. Over the millenia, as humanity moved from surviving only at the mercy of nature to, eventually exercising control over our immediate natural world through agriculture, our relationship with the seasons has come to be defined by crop cycles - planting, growing, harvesting and enduring. However, the relevance of these ancient rites and hallmarks of the natural changing of the seasons to modern society are, at best vestigial.
From now on, we need some new way of dividing and understanding the year. Thenkfully, it seems that an entirely new means of partitioning the year has neatly presented itself. The year need only be divided into two seasons. The first will comprise what was traditionally 'summer', and much of autumn and spring. It will be defined as the season which concerns itself with our collective viewing of a group of ruthlessly preened singletons being marooned in an Iberian villa and tasked with alternately gossiping and competetively sexing their way to supremacy. This is the season of Love Island.
The second, will be slightly shorter than the first, and will be a time for reflection. It will be a time to dwell over what has changed over the course of the year, in your own life, but primarily in the lives of those ex-islanders who you came to know during the first season - the ex-Love Islanders. This will be the season of Love Island: The Christmas Reunion and, actually, it will last for only one day, the first season will consist of the other 364 calendar days.
Well, under this new calendar, we should rejoice, for today is the day of the second season. Today is the day of Love Island: The Christmas Reunion.
The show is set to air at 9pm this evening on ITV2 and will feature what seems to a series of pre-arranged arguments from some of the villa's couples whose relationships have since disintegrated. Based on a clip released on the Love Island Twitter page, it seems that an argument between Sam and Georgia is set to be the most acrimonious, though there are clips circulating of an outraged Ellie and Charlie attritionally driving each other to tears as they berate each other for being 'liars'.
Our Islanders are reunited for Christmas! But will they be naughty or nice? One thing's for sure, it's going to be a cracker. Don't miss Love Island: The Christmas Reunion next Monday at 9pm on @itv2 pic.twitter.com/4hp20Mn4UF
— Love Island (@LoveIsland) December 11, 2018
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In lieu of more concrete information about what will transpire on the show, the publicity photo for the special warrants some discussion.
Firstly, speaking as someone who watched, and wrote extensively on, the majority of the episodes of Love Island during this year's first season - or 'summer' as a vocal, and increasingly sizeable, group of heretics who reject our new calendar insist on still calling it - I would state with some conviction that I have never seen a considerable number of the people in that photo before. I would wager the majority of my worldly possessions that I have never once laid eyes on the man sitting behind Wes on the banister. I have never seen him before, there is nothing you can say to make me believe any differently.
Secondly, poor, dim, sweet Eyal is so rigidly adherent to the idea of 'being a model' that he now appears unable to smile when staring down the barrel of a camera. While everyone else in the photo are all smiling happily, happy for it to be Christmas, happy to be re-united with one another - even all the people who were definitely not at any point on Love Island - Eyal sits there, his face frozen into some sort of placcid smoulder. He's looking at the camera with the same kind of vacant-eyed, lustful intensity that you see drunkards stare at shiny, twirling pillars of kebab meat after the clubs have closed.
Thirdly, Dr. Alex's puce, sunburnt skin - so much a feature of the show during the summer - appears to have receded. Hhe now appears a sort of sickly porcelain, like some delicate Victorian doll that has come to life through magic - then qualified with a medical degree and gone on reality television to do anything up to and including 'hand stuff' with a prospective partner.
Aside from all this, we can but know one thing, it would be folly to not tune in to watch Love Island: The Christmas Reunion tonight at 9pm on ITV2.
