Country Living with Francis Farragher

It’s a bit early in the year to be getting ‘brónach’ about the passing of time but as we approach the last week in August, signalling the end of the holiday season, the time freewheel seems to be whirring around with even greater speed. I remember back the years reminding older cousins of mine that as August passed they faced a return to boarding school which was guaranteed to elicit quite an angry response.

The back-to-school mentality always seems to set in when the final day of the Galway Races arrives while the earlier July dates for the All-Ireland football and hurling finals also sends out a message that we’re coming close to ‘a turn’ in the year.

Maybe, after a week when funerals of people young and old seemed to pile up, there is a greater awareness of how quickly time is slipping by. How often do we guess that someone we knew has passed on five-years ago only to check on RIP and find out that he or she has been gone for twice that length of time.

A couple of weeks back, a colleague of mine texted me to say that the BBC and UK Met Office were reuniting after having gone their separate ways. Nothing strange about this, one might say, only that it seemed like yesterday since we spoke about them splitting up in the first place. There was though, just a little mental shudder when I read that this split had occurred in February 2018. [See also weather page].

It probably all goes back to one of the great human minds of all time – one Albert Einstein – and one of his observations on relativity. He noted that if you put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, it would seem like an hour, but if you sat with a pretty woman for an hour it only seemed like a minute.

August is probably a bit early in the year to be drifting into the world of melancholia but it’s passing still marks two-thirds of the year 2025 having slipped by.

The month is called after the first Roman emperor, Augustus Caesar, in 8BC, and for most of us, we associate it with the peak of the holiday season and the end of our ‘good times’ for another year. The question is whether we can do anything or not, to try and slow down time, or our perception of this elusive commodity.

Pictured: No slowing down of time!