Colm O'Regan: Not even Nphet can take the brighter evenings from us

There's a grand old stretch in the evening on the way and no one can take it away from us.

Spring: I realise now that was taking it for granted. Sure, didn’t the year always get round to it eventually? In primary school we were told it started in February, but part of growing up means understanding that February is, in its hole, the start of spring.

But maybe this year, it has to be. Even more so than last year. If you remember, the first lockdown started on March 13 and the sun came out for three months. The good weather was like an unsustainable PUP fund to get us over a hump. Well, the Weather Exchequer ran out of funds long ago. 

And then we had the week of Bullshit Snow. The only consolation was that children weren’t in school to be disappointed by it. Can you imagine how annoyed you’d be, hoping for a break from double French and maths after lunch, and watching graupel bounce around the road like polystyrene pellets on bin day?

So by the start of last week, everyone was rightly cheesed off and ready for spring. In some form or another. And it came. It wasn’t even about the weather. The weather was nice, but no one believes February. You take a nice February day politely, but never trust February with any personal financial information.

It’s not the weather. It’s the light. You can’t argue with the tilt in the Earth’s axis. There must have been a tipping point early last week in the Bit of a Stretch. We felt it first in little ways. A meal eaten in dusk rather than 40 watt for the first time. But also the angle of the light. The way the sun struck your head. As if you were the inner sanctum of Newgrange and, “whatever look you gave”, the sun just got you right in the moodium and lit you up.

That’s what happened to us last week. We were out for Another Effing Walk. We’d struggled to get out of the house because of our children and our phones. The forecast wasn’t great. Bands of showers were unsure if they were going to organise or not. But maybe they didn’t see the email and, somehow, the sun shone. Halfway through our walk, we saw an empty park bench.

And we sat on it. And basked. Basked like I haven’t in years. Basked like cats on a doorstep. Like walruses on a storm beach.

Even the children were becalmed. It must have been a full 10 minutes of us just gulping down that solar energy and vitamin D like the first pint of the cure on day two of a wedding.

Staring at the bright sky through closed eyes. Noticing for the first time all the motes of dirt floating across the eyelids, wondering if my eyeballs needed a bit of a sprucing up.

If you’d taken my blood pressure then I don’t know if you’d have found any pressure at all. I was basically high. Without the shite-talk (until now).

There’s something else about the changing of the light this year that’s important too. It’s free. It’s ours. It’s unregulated. There are no levels to it. Nphet can’t warn about it. A minister can’t make a hames of it. There’s no premature announcement of the Bit of a Stretch in the Evenings. There’s no leaking of it through a sympathetic newspaper columnist. No taking credit for it. We don’t have to wait for the EU. You don’t get more of it depending on who you’re related to (so far anyway). They don’t get it faster in Britain than we do.

The Stretch will soon become a Grand one and in April, ‘Mighty’. But for now, I’ve seen the light and any bit will do.