Looking forward to the most wonderful day of the year

Country Living with Francis Farragher

We’re always reminded in mid-January about the most depressing day of the year – this year it was identified as the 15th day of our first month, and duly picked up the title of Blue Monday.

Some bright spark has invented a mathematical equation to work out this exact January date every year, taking into account such factors as weather; your level of personal indebtedness; the time that has elapsed since Christmas; failed New Year’s resolutions and low motivational levels.

Somehow or another, there seems to have been a lot of those type of days knocking around through late-Winter and early-Spring with the dreariness factor being ably aided and abetted by spells of inclement weather.

Now, a time to let bygones be bygones and to look forward to what is in my humble opinion the most joyous day of the year, namely the last Sunday in March when we can all start to reclaim our lost evening light.

With the ever-rising path of the sun in the northern hemisphere sky, coupled with the time change at 1am on Sunday morning next (forward by one hour), our window of evening light takes a dramatic turn for the better.

On Sunday evening next, our sunset here in Galway will be almost 8pm giving a lighting-up of time of nearly 8.30pm and if we are blessed with a blue sky, the shreds of daylight could survive until nearly nine-o-clock.

And while we all rather dolefully observe how quickly time is passing when we remark that so-and-so is now nearly 10-years dead, there did seem to be a particular drudgery this year through January, February and the early days of March.

When our clocks go forward by one hour this Sunday morning, here in Ireland and across the UK we will actually be deviating from Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) by one hour as we slip into DST (Daylight Saving Time) or IST (Irish Standard Time) or BST (British Summer Time).

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.