Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Anois teacht an Earraigh
beidh an lá dúl chun shíneadh,
Is tar eis na féil Bríde
ardóigh mé mo sheol.

So wrote Raftery (1779-1835), the last of the Gaelic-order poets. His beautiful verse here says that spring is coming and the days will begin to lengthen, so he's going to move out in the world once the feast of St Brigid has taken place.

Today, 1 February is the St Brigid's Day Raftery commemorated in Anois teacht an Earraigh, but there's certainly no evidence of the coming of spring here in Bavaria. Snow has fallen most days this week and the temperature is parked under zero. It's not as cold in Ireland but the weather is anything but springy. To be sure, there's "a stretch in the evening", as the people say, but the weather is bone chilling. An unscientific analysis of Raftery's poem then might lead one to conclude that our winters are getting colder, not warmer, as many environmentalists would have us believe. The poet certainly suggests that it was quite mild in early February around the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. Note: must check those climate charts.

Why would the wandering poet Raftery have been so aware of St Brigid's Day? Well, back in his time, when Ireland was an agrarian society, the first of February was considered the start of the growth season. The date had long been held sacred as Imbolg, the Celtic festival of Spring, but after Christianity arrived, Saint Brigid was honoured instead of the pagan gods. She was a fifth century mystic who became the patron saint of blacksmiths and healers. By the way, my mother will attend the "blessing of the scarves" in the local church today and, like many believers, she considers the wearing of such a scarf to be far better protection against a sore throat that any amount of antibiotics. Saint Brigid was also the patron saint of poets, a second reason, perhaps, for Raftery's mentioning of her feast day.

Being a saint, naturally Brigid was able to perform miracle. Most of hers involved the multiplication of food such as providing butter for the poor. It is said that she once caused cows to give milk three times the same day to enable visiting bishops to have enough to drink. As Irish monks wandered through Europe, they carried their belief in Brigid with them. In England, many churches were dedicated to her, most notably St. Bride's Church in London's Fleet Street. Designed by Wren, it was the spiritual home of the printing and media trades for 200 years. And now it's in cyberspace — where most hacks and ink-stained drudges (St. Matt?) hang out.

Apart from the blessed scarves, the last vestiges of the Brigid cult in Ireland today are plaited crosses fashioned from rushes. In 1963, when the Republic decided to launch a national television service, the St Brigid's Cross was chosen as its symbol. It remains part of RTE's logo, but in such a stylised form as to be all but unrecognisable.

Diarist of the day: Frances Partridge, 1 February 1971

"Yesterday evening ?Eardley and I spend some time goggling at the television -- partly at yet another American moon shot, party at a film about Anne of Cleves. The moon shots disgust me in some curious way; there seem such wide disparities involved -- between the boredom of listening to a flat American voice reciting figures and distances, mixed with 'OKs' and 'ERs', and the horrifying human tensions and anxieties laying behind them -- and between the courage and dange of the astronauts and the cowardly Eardley's enjoyment of that courage and danger. Perhaps I malign him or exaggerate the nature of his emotion, but I take his feelings as typical of many people's. So what is left but dismay and semi-disbelief as I loll back gazing with a sort of diastase at the infinitely brilliant mastery of space by men's minds."