Seeking trinkets of solace as our season of change arrives
Country Living with Francis Farragher
One of the strange things about looking up opinions on the autumn season is how popular it seems to be with most scribes, and particularly those with a love of nature and the great outdoors.
There are times though that I’m not entirely enchanted with the lure of autumnal charm and particularly so on a grey and wet Tuesday morning when the penny drops that the decision to wear a short-sleeved shirt and no gansey was not such a good one.
With the change in the GAA season, the All-Ireland hurling final is already chalked into the record books while the football decider will also be done and dusted by September 1. Even the Galway Races seem to be slipping into the distant memory section of the brain.
Then, there’s the big return to school that seems to be eating a bit more than usual into the latter days of August while the ads will now be appearing about the night-classes in our educational establishments that could help us to while away the growing hours of darkness.
Even in the local hostelry where the cares of the world can be temporarily parked, ne’er a night passes in the second half of August when there isn’t a moan over a pint of black stuff about how quickly the evenings are ‘closing in’.
Sometimes, I can extract just a little solace from taking a glance at John Keats’ Ode to Autumn and his romantic descripting of the season of transition from Summer to Winter: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless, With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run.”
Poor old Mr. Keats, one of the great English Romantic poets of the early 1800s, didn’t manage to experience any great multitudes of Autumns, dying at the age of 25 from TB or ‘consumption’, but he was undoubtedly madly in love with our third season of the year.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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