Country Living with Francis Farragher

I’m pretty much blue in the face from reading articles about why we should all be in love with September and while I do have a certain almost lonesome regard for our ninth month of the year, it always seems to be a time of transition . . . from light to darkness . . . heat to coolness . . . and holidays to schooldays.

It’s also the month of such things as the autumnal equinox arriving and we normally too have the harvest moon . . . almost as if that lunar presence is also reminding us that the season of night-time has arrived. By September’s last day on Monday next, our sunrise to sunset window will have dwindled to 11 hours and 38 minutes as compared to almost 17 hours in mid-June.

And yet for all that September always seemed to be a month that inspired writers and poets to wax ever so lyrically about the early month of our autumn season from John Keats with his season of ‘mists and mellow fruitfulness’ to Paddy Kavanagh’s ‘On an apple-ripe September morning’ as he looked forward to the threshing in a neighbour’s haggard.

From a historical perspective, there’s something of a contradiction in the title of the month itself. In the old Roman calendar, September originates from the Latin word ‘septem’ which translates into seven, and in those days before 46BC there were only 10 months in the year and September came in at number seven.

However, the Caesars changed all that starting with Julius in 46BC when he invented the Julian calendar [called after himself of course] which introduced January and February as well as changing the names of our seventh and eight months – Quintillis to July and Sextilis to August. Again, narcissism was to the fore with Julius and Augustus [Caesar] having the desire to put themselves into our calendars forever more.

Anyway, back to the mundanity of the present and on a Thursday morning of last week, I got another reminder of the arrival of September when my approach to the Coolough Roundabout on the approach was a matter of joining a queue of cars almost a mile long. The month when the schools are back and the third level students are also descending in their droves on our little city.