Country Living with Francis Farragher

It’s normally a time of the year when even the most sullen of grouches perks up a little, thanks to the lengthening days, the jingle of early-morning bird song, and of course that Sunday morning in Spring when the clocks are nudged forward by an hour.

If only we could get the weather to oblige and just grant us a half-decent window of sunshine and dryness, then I suspect it would lift our moods and switch us on to summer mode.

True, we don’t get the buffeting of hurricanes, flooding, volcanos, heat waves or arctic temperatures of some parts of the world, but we are still entitled to feel just a little aggrieved at the greyness of our dank days since the middle of last summer.

Wet fields, sports pitches and golf courses have tended to edge the weaker-willed souls among us to take maybe just a little too much consolation from the ‘pint of plain’, but the stretch in the evenings is always a little lift to the spirit.

An effort has been made to cut the lawns on the odd drier day we get while some cattle have been released from their term of shed imprisonment and already there’s talk of the turf being cut, despite all sorts of threats from European judges and bureaucrats.

There is though something uplifting about that last Sunday in March when that ‘spring forward’ of the clocks gives us a sunset around the 8pm mark and we can at last bid farewell to the bleakness of Winter.

The SAD syndrome – Seasonally Affected Disorder – is by now a medically researched ailment brought about by the absence of natural light from our lives during the winter months.

Some people call in the ‘Winter Depression’, and out the country years back as children, we would hear talk from our parents as we moved into November, about ‘such-a-one’taking to the bed’.