Forgiving April for her sins with those ‘ould cow days’

Country Living with Francis Farragher

There’s a seat in my ‘local’ that I’ve graduated to over the years but I’m not too sure whether that’s a good sign or not. Firstly, it shows a frequency of visits that could indicate a tendency to form a dodgy habit and secondly, it’s a seat where I’m reminded of, where people who have sat in it in the past before rambling off to their eternal reward.

The other night as we marvelled about our spell of glorious Mid-Spring weather, I was reminded of a previous incumbent of the seat who always warned us to beware of what he called, ‘the ould cow days’.

That sparked a spirited debate about the ‘ould cow days’ in terms of how many of them there were; exactly when did they fall; and whether they were at the start or the beginning of April.

Us Irish at times do have the habit of trying to ‘take the good out of things’ and the other evening instead of enjoying the blue skies and radiant March sunset, there were rumblings of worse times to come. “We’ll pay for this later’” is always the great mantra of the weather begrudgers, instead of relishing the joys of ‘the present’.

My late predecessor in the corner stool beside the fire loved to tell the tale of ‘the ould cow days’ and how they had managed to ‘sink’ the bovine who had spent many, many summers on this earth in a hale and hearty condition.

In the great world of Irish mythology, a serious row had broken out between the month of March and the Bó Ribheach, a brindled animal who dared to boast about her ill-advised notions of immortality and her ability to withstand anything weatherwise that the third month of the year could throw at her.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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