In a Word . . . Shadow

Ireland should be known as "the Land Without Shadows". Such a unique selling point too. You can imagine the Fáilte Ireland slogan – "Come to wonderful shadow-free Ireland where the hills are green and the people are not".

Hmm? Strike that one.

I once got into trouble at then UCG (now NUI Galway) when I organised a debate on the topic: “That Little Red Riding Hood was Green”. Very serious people felt I was trivialising matters. As if.

The “Land of Shadows” idea came to me this day last month, though it was a Thursday. June 16th, was Bloomsday (Hark! I hear you exclaim). It was grey all over Dublin. The newspapers were right (of course): grey was general all over Ireland. Over the Bog of Allen and, further westwards.

Everywhere except for bloody Cork. Always the exception.

Bloomsday should be a national holiday. Think of it. A holiday in honour of a Dubliner who never existed. How Irish! How they would love it, those delightful tourists with imagination and . . .er . . . high disposable incomes. Not that we would be such philistines. But of course not. Just . . . practical.

Then, being a grey day, I fell to wondering how it must be to live your entire life in a place of continuous, never-ending, predictable, dull (!) sunshine. It has to be so bad for the soul: there where the sun shines, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

Surely we should alert the world to the delights of cloud, how they make for such spectacular sunsets and great photographs at any time of day. And to that utterly holy absence of shadow on those very special days as when, also, soft Irish rain might freshen sun-starched skin on so many green and pleasant fairways.

If you live in such desert-bordering climates as found in the Middle East, Africa, Australia, and the US, you must hanker after such moist experience and spectacular skies as we take for granted.

So, “Come to ‘the Land Without Shadows’, experience four seasons in a day not just the same old, same old. See skies streaked with colour and experience those special grey days when you can truly walk alone. Come to Ireland.”

(Was that okay?)

Shadow from the Old English sceadwe, sceaduwe, from Old Saxon skado, meaning "a dark image cast something interposed between an object and light source".

[ inaword@irishtimes.com ]