Country Living with Francis Farragher

On one of the dying mornings of January as I listened to Marty Whelan on Lyric FM while stuck in the now inevitable morning traffic jam heading into the Coolagh Roundabout on the east side of Galway city, he said that there always seemed to be around 10 weeks in our first month    of the year.

And even though I regularly bemoan how quickly time is passing, January is a month that I have no great grá for, and that’s probably in common with a lot of other humans in the northern hemisphere – always good to see the back of it.

It’s a month that never seems to brighten up and especially so in the mornings with our sunrises almost doggedly refusing to surrender to the inevitable stretch in the days even if the evenings are a bit more receptive to the reawakening sun.

Maybe it’s just coincidence or morbidity but most families I know of seem to have lost loved back through the years in January with The Grim Reaper having the habit of making regular calls during the first 31 days of the year.

February though is a far friendlier creature as our sunrises pull back well before the 8am mark while, by the end of the month, the sunsets have the manners to wait for the Angelus bells to be rung before going to slumberland.

Our second month can of course deliver its harsh spells of weather but if we’re lucky enough to have the weather gods smiling upon us with a sense of benignity then it can help to give us the feeling that the worst of the season of darkness is over.

While our meteorologists will assign the first day of spring as March 1 – based on empirical temperature data for November, December and January – as innocent fledglings of the 1960s, we were always assured by the Franciscans that St. Brigid’s Day marked the end of the winter season.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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