Country Living with Francis Farragher

There I was in my local on one of The Races nights reasonably content with my lot as I supped my second pint when a man not big in stature but never short on philosophical observations made an announcement; “Sure The Races are nearly over; isn’t the year gone.”

I just couldn’t let him away with it, as much and all as I lament the passing of time, and I had to remind him that we had still the best part of five months left in 2024 to while away our hours.

In his defence though, August does tend to be one of those defining months of change when we say goodbye to The Races for another year and there’s talk of the evenings ‘closing in’ while the back-to-school advertisements blare out from every radio station.

The naming of the month, like a lot more other things goes back to the days of the Roman Empire, when one Augustus Caesar ruled the roost in the Italian capital during that era of time when we went from BC to AD. In fairness to him, Augusts was entitled to his place in the calendar given that his predecessor, Julius Caesar, had July called after him.

It’s a month too, when many of us take a break from the rigours of normal work and enjoy a holiday break but like Charles Lamb in his essay about the superannuated man, the holiday time also seems to fly by.

Like BC and AD as markers of time, the Covid era seems to be a more contemporaneous version of when certain things happened and we try to remember when such-and-such-a-one passed away with the inevitable question being asked of: “Was it before or after Covid?”

By next March the ‘start of Covid’ in Ireland will be five-years away and last month in the run-up to the All-Ireland football final it was kind of hard to grasp that it had been 23-years since Galway’s last success in 2021.

Like the line from the old Frank Sinatra song, “It only seems like yesterday as down the road I go” and of course the whole time conundrum has taxed the minds of some of the planet’s great philosophers and scientists down through the years.

For many of us, time is marked out with critical family events like births, deaths and marriages as dates like the passing of parents are forever etched into the memory bank.