February brought the mi-ádh as the weather Gods howled

Country Living with Francis Farragher

There’s a vet I’ve been friendly with over the years who would always caution me against saying that things were going well. He always reckoned that the only way not to rock the boat when things were going smoothly was to say very little about your temporary good fortune and to keep a low profile.

Sure enough, there were many times when my observations about not having to see him for a while would herald a rash of visits to his practice: it was a case of either no contact for three to four months or five visits in a week.

Looking back on February, I kind of felt the same way about the month, when I glanced back at a column of four weeks ago when a fulsome tribute was paid to a time many people consider the start of Spring.

If the conditions are reasonably benign, February can be an inspiring month with the little ‘stretch’ coming in the mornings and evenings, while there’s often a reasonable ‘pick’ of grass arriving in the fields.

But this year February turned into a real brute . . . brimming with storms, lengthy cloudbursts of rain, hail and sleet as well as real cut to the wind that reminded us that our second month might after all just belong to the winter season. Anyway, praising it too early in the season certainly didn’t have the desired impact this year.

There’s a great Irish word for this of course and it’s mi-ádh which translates into misfortune, and it’s a word I use to hear years back when my mother would be launching a little onslaught against the ‘Demon Drink’.

Her great little advisory line as regards ‘the bottle’ was that there was ‘mi-ádh in drink’ but a similar principle seems to apply when we start to appreciate prematurely what the ‘turn in the year’ might bring.

We had been chugging along reasonably okay through the late-autumn and mid-winter period with just a little scare from the former Hurricane Lorenzo on October 3 last, which in the end, blew out without a bother.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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