Country Living
Trying to eke out some of the positives from a wearying year
Country Living with Francis Farragher
It’s not been an easy task, and maybe it’s case of the ‘whistling past the graveyard’ syndrome, but over recent days, I’ve been desperately scratching my head to come up with just 10 positive things that have arisen since ‘the plague’ descended upon us. Maybe it has been the number of times over recent weeks that I’ve experienced spontaneous confessions from normally very stable colleagues that in the throes of what I could only describe as mild depression. Some aren’t sleeping properly . . . others are mildly hallucinating about just a few pints with friends in the locals . . . and others just want to go somewhere – anywhere.
So, my list of 10 positives out of Covid, is predicated on something of a myth. Like the rest of the population, I’m at my wits end to keep my conscious mind above the sanity survival level, but over the course of five or six hundred words, the aim is to somehow pretend, or even trick ourselves into believing, that there are some good things to be extracted from the pit of Covid despair. I’ll even try to ignore any mention of recent AstraZeneca problems.
- We are tending to have money in our pockets
Yes, the reality has hit home for most of us who enjoy a couple of pints in the local, that it is quite an expensive little pastime even if we can’t put a price on its therapeutic value. The overdraft limit in the days before pay-day now hasn’t been threatened with a breach for the best part of a year, but again I feel that I may be tempting fate. New furniture is arriving and a tractor clutch has decided to pack up as if to say to me, ‘that it you don’t spend the lucre one way, then you’ll spend it another’. But yes, there’s a lot less been spent on items like booze, diesel, the odd restaurant sojourn, shoes and clothes. As for the need for cash in your pocket, it seems to be a thing of the past.
- Less traffic and shorter journey times to work
I’m still one of those commuters making the daily trip into the city for work but instead of the normal 40 to 50 minutes, to complete the journey, this has now slipped down to almost half. This doesn’t mean I’m driving any faster – in fact the opposite – I’ve slowed down a lot. But the traffic snarl-ups are now few and far between, and there’s also a realisation that the ‘old road option’ – as distinct from the motorway – is a lot shorter and far more efficient as far as fuel consumption is concerned.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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Country Living with Francis Farragher
WE all get attached . . . nay, even dependent . . . on our technology devices, most notably the mobile phone, but here and there the technology does spook me a bit.
A couple of weeks ago, as I sat into my car one evening as I prepared to head for the hills, I began to sing a verse or two of the Beatles classic ‘Yesterday’.
The Apple CarPlay system was on in my car and I had scarcely completed the first verse of the song when lo and behold what started to play on the speakers but of one Paul McCartney with the ‘real thing’.
Now, some of my technology nerd acquaintances will come up with a simple explanation as to why this happened but it surely wasn’t a coincidence.
There are times too when I think I’m paranoid, or maybe not, when after certain conversations have taken place about anything from cars to canisters, an ad flashes across my iPhone about the topic we’d just been discussing.
And now, the latest buzz words in the whole chain of technology advancement are Artificial Intelligence or AI, which I have to admit is just a little bit above my basic level of competency or understanding of high-tech jargon.
Being of country stock, the AI initials always meant only one thing back the years – artificial insemination – when the man with the straws of bull semen would arrive on the farm to impregnate cows in what had to be a very non-pleasurable experience for all concerned.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Country Living with Francis Farragher
Sometimes, the return drive from Dublin after a weekend sojourn in The Capital can feel a bit longer than it should. The passengers are generally tired and try to steal forty winks so often the radio is the best companion to court. With local stations out of range, I flicked through the channels on a Sunday evening and stumbled into one of those programmes that once you hear the beginning of . . . well it just sucks you in.
It was a documentary made a number of years back for Radio 1 on the Whistleblowers’ theme, featuring the story of one Father Gerard McGinnity who in the late 1970s and early 1980s was regarded as one of the ‘up-and-coming stars’ of the Catholic Church in Ireland being appointed as Senior Dean of Maynooth College in 1978 at the age of 32, decades younger than any of his predecessors.
The Armagh native seemed destined for high places in the Church hierarchy, with ‘the sky the limit’ for someone so young to have advanced so quickly through the ranks. However, all was to change dramatically around 1984, when Fr. McGinnity was made aware of allegations of possibly of improper contacts between the then Vice-President of Maynooth College, a Fr. Micheál Ledwith, and young seminarians.
Fr. McGinnity, still alive and well in his mid-70s, spoke on the documentary about how he wrestled with his conscience and what he should do after these concerns were raised with him.
Eventually, he made the decision, that he needed to express his concerns to a number of bishops and the then Papal Nuncio, Gaetano Alibrandi, expecting that his concerns would be treated in confidence and properly investigated. Neither of those two things happened.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Country Living with Francis Farragher
It’s a condition that’s eased with the passing of time but here and there little symptoms of it return. A sore calf muscle; a cough that lasts more than a week or so; a stiffness in the back of the neck of shoulders; a soft little lump on the bottom of a foot . . . now that is a whole range of harmless enough symptoms but when you add in a measure of hypochondria to that cocktail . . . well then the medical self-diagnosis can be devastating.
The only little consolation for an ordinary Joe Soap, who might occasionally suffer from this condition, is that it’s one shared by many famous people across the globe. Over a decade or so, a pretty widely acclaimed book by Brian Dillon, entitled, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives, documented the lives and times of nine famous people spanning the centuries who were afflicted with extreme doses of the condition.
From Charles Darwin to Charlotte Bronte to Andy Warhol, these are famous people who had an unhealthy preoccupation with their health or what they believed was impending doom coming down the track for them. Of course, the inevitable is coming for all of us either sooner or later, but the trick is not to be envisioning the final whistle being blown early into the second half of the match.
Mark Twain was probably ahead of his time when he cautioned about reading too many health books ‘in case you might die of a misprint’ and now for every little pain of headache we experience, the temptation is there to flick through Google where invariably you will find a fatal affliction connected to that occasional twinge in your big toe.
Hypochondria can be defined rather simply as an irrational fear about health and death and while to non-sufferers, it’s the butt of many jokes and moments of jocularity, the rather more serious side to it is that it can make life pretty miserable for the person that believes, for no particular reason, that the end is nigh. It can lead to depression or be caused by depression but the simplest cure for it may be just a simple heart-to-heart chat with your GP.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
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