A joyous welcome for the arrival of that ‘happy day’

Country Living with Francis Farragher

I’m pretty unashamed . . . and maybe a tad repetitive too . . . about what my favourite day of the year is, and has been, for many decades now. It’s always been that last Sunday in March when the clocks change and the evening sunset lazily stretches its reach. With just one turn of the clock handle, our sunset springs forward to around the 8pm mark, and the very real lure is there to go outside and do something in the open air of the late evening.

Like the rest of the population, I’ve found this to have been one long and hard Winter, even if our weather wasn’t particularly severe. True, it was a fair bit wetter than average since last October, but in terms of extreme events like raging storms or great freeze-ups, the past few months haven’t been so bad at all.

But yet, it’s a Winter that has seemed to go on forever. We no sooner had Christmas ‘promised to us’ by the powers that be, than we were roundly scolded for being too bold, leading to Surge 3 of the dreaded coronavirus. The inevitable lockdown followed and January – never my favourite month – just seemed to go on forever.

Like the story of the little boy trying to walk to school on the slippy road, going two steps backwards for every one forward, we just don’t seem to have gotten any breaks from our battle with ‘The Covid’.

We (Ireland and the EU) were months behind the Brits in getting the vaccines rolled out; deliveries never seemed to arrive on schedule and still don’t; and our mood seems to have worsened every time we hear that huge swathes of the population of Northern Ireland will be vaccinated while we lurch around the 5% to 10% mark. Not bedrudgery . . . just a sense that we’re being left behind. Without a shred of a doubt, the UK left the EU ‘sitting’ when it came to the vaccine strategy. Is it any wonder that there’s no humour on us?

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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