Denis Lehane: Farmers need eight days a week
Do your weeks go by in a blur? has the answer.
While you might believe from reading my news that drink and women are the scarcest commodities in rural Ireland today, I’m telling you, it’s time that has us all in a panic.
There’s simply no time. The days run too fast, the weeks fly by in a instant.
As I said to a fellow in the pub, only the other night, “I haven’t the time to scratch myself, never mind get through a hard week of work on the farm.”
Our workload on the land is too great, our time too limited.
Something needs to be done before we crack up entirely, and I feel I might have the answer.
What I’m proposing today is, I suppose, a bit radical, but I feel we are left with little alternative in getting more out of the week.
I’m asking that we create an eighth day in the week.
Whether it comes at the beginning or at the end matters little, all I’m suggesting is that we add another 24 hours to the clock to help the under-pressure farmer.
An extra day slid in between, let’s say Tuesday and Wednesday, or Thursday and Friday is what would really make all the difference.
We can call it Dennyday if you like, for I invented it.
Anyhow, with Dennyday, we might finally get on top of things.
At the moment, before we know where we are it’s Saturday evening and we are stretched out in the bathtub, preparing for the weekend ahead.
Preparing to down tools for a Sunday of prayer and worship.
Another week over, with little achieved.
The only difference that adding a Dennyday would make is that the summer would last all the longer.
A Dennyday would be a plus, in every conceivable way.
The few extra days in the calendar year could then be readjusted at the end of the year, by taking a day a week out of the winter months.
Thus squaring the circle and, in another positive move, reducing the long, long winter which plagues us all.
It’s a radical proposal, I agree, but just because it’s me that is suggesting it, and not some scientific genius, should not be grounds to ridicule the notion.
I mean, when President Kennedy foresaw man’s trip to the moon back in his day, everyone didn’t go around thinking he was talking through his arse.
They listened to him, they believed the man, because he was a Kennedy with a fantastic smile and a glorious mane of hair.
Well, today, I’m asking for a bit of that Kennedy faith.
I may not have the Kennedy hair and I certainly don’t have the fabulous teeth, but I’m asking for the same chance as JFK.
After all, a few years on from Kennedy’s speech, the Yanks did, by all accounts, land a man on the moon.
And if they really did, or they did not, sure who cares now. The flaky film looked convincing enough, wherever Armstrong was when he acted it out.
My point really is, what I’m proposing here is far less balmpot than what Kennedy was talking about back in the early 1960s.
It’s only a readjustment to the calendar, in order to get the farming show in top gear.
I’m not suggesting we go planet hopping to explore far away galaxies, I’m only asking for enough time to get the job done here on the ground.
