No man is an island as we try to survive the 2020 jinx

Country Living with Francis Farragher

I’m always a little loathe to wish that a particular day, week, month or year would pass – on the basis that time is already freewheeling out of control – but 2020 seems to be a jinxed number in all our lives, to which we’d all like to say: good riddance.  I don’t know how many people have said to me over the past couple of weeks, that the only thing left to happen us was the inevitable arrival of the plague of locusts.

The Egyptians – who to my mind got some horribly bad press in the early days of the Bible – had 10 disasters inflicted upon them by God in an effort to get the Pharaoh to free the Israelites from slavery.

The most famous of those 10 ‘inflictions’ was the plague of locusts that would cover the face of the ground so that it couldn’t be seen and, in the process, devour everything in their path.

Those Plagues of Egypt also included water turning to blood, a plague of frogs and lice, livestock disease, an epidemic of festering boils, thunderstorms of hail and fire, three days of darkness, and the deaths of every first-born son.

And, getting back to the dreaded locusts, I also recall reading an article recently about several countries in East Africa and South Asia, who earlier this year, had hundreds of thousands of acres of crops devoured by billions of the dreaded insects.

All this is by way of putting a context of what we’ve been going through in 2020 which just mightn’t seem so bad when compared to the Book of Exodus, but by any more contemporary barometer, these are pretty miserable times.

We all started out in 2020 looking forward to a spectacular year of artistic endeavour with Galway’s Capital of Culture designation but the jinx wasn’t long getting to work here either.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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