Slightly moidered by our new layers of freedom

THERE was a great word from my childhood days that we used a fair bit in our household to describe confusing situations. The word was ‘moider’ or ‘moither’ which I had always assumed came from an Irish background, that is until I went to look it up in a Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla (Ó Dónaill, 1977), and couldn’t find any trace of it.

The word however does appear in both spelling forms in any of the standard English dictionaries such as Collins and it translates into someone being in a confused or bewildered state. My father would often refer to an annoying person that he would meet in the pub or at a fair as someone, ‘who would moider a nation’.

Over the past few weeks, the word kind of strayed back into my conscious brain, well at least the part of it that still functions properly, in relation to the ‘new normal’ that descended upon us like a visitation from The Holy Ghost, with the dramatic exit of Covid from our everyday lives.

Now I’m never one to tempt fate by saying how well things are going, as I’ve learned in the past from my local vet, who always advised against utterances of excessive positivity as regards animal welfare, just in case anything would unexpectedly go wrong. Yet, the change that has occurred over the past few weeks in relation to Covid restrictions, has taken me aback somewhat.

I remember around the middle of January talking to a few people in the pub business for one of the usual run-of-the-mill stories that we carry in newspapers about the possibility of a relaxation in opening times, and how they were hoping that by February 1, they might get an extra two hours added on the old 8pm curfew, allowing them to stay open until 10pm.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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