Country Living with Francis Farragher

“When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look,

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.”

[‘When You Are Old’: William Butler Yeats].

When October arrives, alas by now many of them, it brings a mix of melancholia and resignation as the mornings stay dark until well after 8am and sullen autumn skies pull the curtains on natural light by the time we hear the dong of the Angelus Bell.

‘Brónach’ is a great Irish word to describe that bit of mood slippage that can happen with many of us this time of year but sometimes the transition period is worse than the finality of winter’s arrival, which I always associate with the time change on the last Sunday of October.

The Bard of Inniskeen, Paddy Kavanagh, always seemed to cement that link between October and sadness in his poem, ‘Memory of my Father’ when he noted so poignantly that: “Every old man I see, In October coloured weather, Seems to say to me, I was once your father.”

Lines like that do tend to have a glue like attachment to the mind and on a personal level, our tenth month was also the one where I said farewell to my own papa, in a family year when death seemed to be lurking around every doorway.

Sometimes, we can be lucky with ‘October coloured weather’, but on a Thursday morning of last week as a I drove along the M17 and M18 with a river of water on the motorway and sporadic lightning flashes that lit up the blackened skies, it was rather difficult to discard the veil of gloom.

The swallows – at least around my neck of the woods – also seemed to pack their bags that bit earlier this September, before their departure to the warmer south, but before this little literary wander transcends any further into gloom, it’s time to look at some of the brighter [oops not the right word] aspects of the seasonal change.

Many of us country folk tend to feel huge pangs of guilt during the summer season if we don’t fill each moment of sunlight with that never ending list of tasks but at least when October arrives, and darkness marks the arrival home . . . well then, it’s only a case of completing the essential tasks.

Pictured: THE OLD TURF FIRE: Louise Delaney and Johnny Langan ‘cosy up’ beside a rousing turf fire at Mannion’s Bar, Abbeyknockmoy, during one of our colder nights last winter. The glow of the burning sods in the open fire is one of the little consolations of the longer nights.  PHOTO: FRANCIS MOORE.