I’ll miss the calm and colours of winter

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

While you’re all doubtless excited about the arrival of spring next week, Lá Fhéile Bhríde, buds bulging and crocus bulbs bursting out of the ground, this contrary colyoomist will feel a sense of loss. Of course I’m glad to see the light earlier in the morning, but equally I’ve enjoyed those extra minutes in bed, afforded by the darkness beyond the glass.

I’ll not miss the flu, nor the wiping of the inside car windscreen. I’ll be pleased when it’s light late enough to find the wee hole in the ground that secures the front gate. No fun, struggling in a howling gale and sideways rain under a moonless sky, one hand holding Lady Dog’s lead, the other scraping the gate bolt along the ground, muttering about fluorescent paint.

I won’t miss those moments when winter feels adversarial. It might be Seasonal Affective Disorder, SAD, the lack of sunlight and Vitamin D that brings your mood down. It might be all that Christmas frenzy, a hissing cauldron of stress and activity so very far from Silent Night.

Or was it the psychological warfare of naming storms that tipped you over the edge? We who live on this Atlantic seaboard know that unless it’s a Red warning, we’re not bothered. We’ll take your gales, your eights and nines, but when it hits ten, we notice.

You can’t help but notice, because a storm makes a noise of its own; a jaw-dropping intestine-squidging roar that makes you give thanks you can close the window and stay safe and warm inside.

Now they give a name to anything Orange or above, so we feel constantly under threat from names with no faces. Inevitably it is the storm least hyped that delivers the most shocking blow, but nobody really expects the Met Office or Met Éireann to get it perfectly right.

To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.