An Irishman's Diary

The Daily Telegraph's fashion correspondent had a yearning tone when she wrote recently about something called "country chic". Her subject was inspired by a friend who had abandoned London for marriage to a sheep farmer in Shropshire. "Although our lives couldn't be more different," she wrote, "we still chat frequently - her about delivering lambs at 4am; me about getting up at 4am to catch a flight to New York".

She cited two other examples of people living the rural idyll: a former member of the pop group Blur, now making cheese in the Cotswolds, and the winsome one-time newsreader Selina Scott, rearing goats in Yorkshire and weaving mohair socks from them.

Such lives were beyond the reach of most urbanites, sighed the fashionista. All they could do was wear the clothes.

Her prescription for the country look was a mixture of "the classic and the quirky". A good model, she suggested, was "the Duchess of Devonshire, who was once photographed in ball gown and wellies, feeding her chickens". The latter image had inspired a designer's whole 2002 winter collection, the fashion writer added.

Not for the first time, it struck me how wide a gap there is between the way the Irish and English see "the country". It hits me every year at the Cheltenham racing festival, where their country set gathers in force. You can always tell the English at Cheltenham, because they're the only ones wearing green, even on St Patrick's Day. Green tweed, to be exact, although one or two may occasionally go a bit mad and opt for brown.

That they all look alike adds to the challenge for Irish "colour" reporters, trying to find who's who in the parade ring. You sometimes have to ask British colleagues why a certain person is attracting photographers, and the replies can be withering.

"That's the Duchess of Devonshire," you'll be told, sniffily. And before you can stop yourself you're apologising, and muttering that you didn't recognise her without the chickens.

I don't think we have such a thing as country chic here, yet. This is probably because, for all Ireland has changed, "the country" is still too much with us to be fetishised. It's rare enough to meet a Dubliner who's more than two generations removed from a farm.

Most Irish people would still get at least a pass on the test set by Mrs Loftus in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when she suspects the hero of being a townie passing himself off as a farm hand. Even a Leinster rugby supporter would probably manage the first three questions in her quick-fire quiz (Huck's correct answers in brackets), viz: "When a cow's laying down, which end of her gets up first?" ("The hind end"). "Well, then, a horse?" ("The for'ard end"). "Which side of a tree does the most moss grow on?" ("North side").

Only the fourth question might stump the average Irish urban dweller, and maybe a few rural ones too. As Mrs Loftus put it: "If fifteen cows is browsing on a hillside, how many of them eats with their heads pointed in the same direction?" We'll let the Leinster rugby fans among you ponder that one for a moment before replying. OK, time's up. The answer (which of course Huck knew) is: "All fifteen."

It's true. Check it yourself next time you're in the country. If not distracted by something, grazing cows will arrange themselves in the same direction. It has to do with the wind. They stand with their backs to it, partly for shelter, partly for safety. By facing away from the breeze, they can see potential threats from one side while smelling them from the other.

Cows are nature's weathervanes, in fact. There's even a New England proverb that says: "A cow with its tail to the west/ makes weather the best. A cow with its tail to the east/ makes weather the least." It doesn't scan very well, admittedly, but the idea is that an easterly breeze (which in the US would be from the Atlantic) means rain.

It would be the other way around here: like some electronic equipment, New England proverbs don't always work in Europe.

Trawling tourism websites the other day, I saw a listing for a restaurant in Ennistymon that made a rather eccentric boast about its location. It was "just a hare's breath from the dramatic Atlantic coastline", apparently. The claim would have been even more amusing if I hadn't remembered that, not long ago, this newspaper fielded a complaint when the same malapropism was perpetrated in its pages.

I remember thinking then that this was a sign of the urbanisation of Ireland. The country was on the pig's back, climbing the pecking order of industrialised economies, I reflected. Consequently, there was a whole generation growing up who, when it came to rural or farmyard metaphors, didn't have the sense that God gave geese.

But like all the more popular mistakes, this one is at least plausible. In fact, maybe the Clare restaurant's claim was gramatically deliberate. At the current rate of coastal erosion, after all, it would be hard to relax in a restaurant that was a "hair's breadth" from the Atlantic (especially if it was on a cliff); whereas a "hare's breath", while suggestive of proximity, is reassuringly vague.

It also has a poetic quality that might appeal to, say, Londoners dreaming of escape. You can picture the ad. A summer sun sets over the Atlantic. A gentle easterly breeze causes every cow in Clare to face America. Meanwhile, in a clump of grass on the Burren, a hare takes a break from his browsing to gaze westwards, sighing at the beauty of it all, so that a little herb-scented breath escapes him and drifts gently towards the sea.