Enjoying the sweet songs of spring

MUCH AS I appreciated the weather on our first weekend back in Ireland — the biting wind, the driving rain, the boggy fields — I would have to recommend to my compatriots and contemporaries a few winter months in Spain’s Sierra Nevada mountains, if only for the increased lung capacity that walking the local high altitude paths endows.

Following two months in those mountains, low West Cork hills that have previously taxed me are, since I returned, taken at a canter and while my breathing previously sounded like loud, out-of-tune bagpipes, it is now audible only to those a metre or less away.

Melodious rather than discordant, it no longer causes my companions to fear that my own Shank’s Mare may give out and that they will have to mount me on a litter and carry me, or tie me to an improvised travois.