Top of the Morning

It’s been a grand soft day with a great stretch in the evening and hopefully the wind is always at your back. There was a time that these sort of phrases appealed only to the returning diaspora on holiday and toothless farmers who have never left Spiddal. All the same, these comments on the weather are a great distraction from the current economic climate and if you are talking about the weather you can’t talk about corrupt politicians or paedophile priests or anything else that people want to call in to chat shows and complain about: “Joe, it’s shockin’ Joe…”

Luckily the weather of the last few weeks managed to take precedence over family Christmas arguments, the country falling apart and what they’re up to next door. But when you think about it, the weather actually is more important to our survival than anything else. I’ve been wondering what might happen if the snow and ice hadn’t melted? After about a week of it most people were out of water, pipes had burst. Trucks couldn’t get in and out of town and travel was almost impossible.

Now if we really were aul farmers who went around talking about the stretch in the evening, we would also have a stock of potatoes piled up outside in a shed and enough food to keep us going for the winter even if we can’t get past the door. And we’d have turf and logs too, instead of heaters that are not working. When you think of it, not living off the land is a bit of a risk, and it wouldn’t even take a whole winter to wipe us out if things got bad enough.

So it made me think about all of those greetings that actually make more sense than any of our long winded ‘going forward’ speeches.

So when someone at work said ‘top of the morning to you’ today at work, I surprised him by knowing the proper Irish reply: ‘and the rest of the day to yourself’.