Woke up yesterday morning to find we had no water! This is a first in this euphemistically-titled "cold snap" which has now transmogrified into the "Big Freeze" after three unrelenting weeks of sub-zero temperatures. (That's Centigrade, not Fahrenheit for anyone reading this from the USA where I believe Fahrenheit is the norm). I can't get my head around it where the weather is concerned; I believe 0C is 32F, which doesn't seem to make any sense. I learned my body temperatures in Fahrenheit as a young student nurse, and it was much later that the old 98.4F became 37C as the normal human body temperature.
In any case, the cold spell (sounds better!) will be with us for another week or 10 days according to the weather gurus (a.k.a. Evelyn Cusack or Gerry Fleming the winking weatherman) on RTÉ (the national broadcaster).These are real Met Office pros, not what's disparagingly referred
to as the weather totties on other channels. That's real RTÉ snobbery, as rocket science isn't needed to read the weather, only to hold a discourse on it. Then you call in the Met Office experts, who can rabbit on for hours about high and low pressure and cold fronts from Siberia and other incomprehensible stuff. I 
know it's all highly meaningful to some, especially farmers, sailors and fishermen.The latter probably rely on the Shipping Forecast - which always brings to mind BBC Radio 4 after midnight when the Litany of the Shipping Forecast is broadcast after the strains of "Sailing By " fade away. I love hearing the mysterious terminology and names which are a roll call of the coastal
regions of the North Sea and th
e North Atlantic - from North Utsire to Rockall and all places in between - as I drift off to sleep. I can see why Annie Proulx called her wonderful Newfoundland-set book The Shipping News - it has a romantic mystique, probably because it is so removed from most people's ordinary lives.
Here are some photos of the countryside over the Christmas period right up to today. We are in the grip of winter, the harshest since 1963, and here in Lismore we felt a tad cheated as we had all the cold but none of the fun - in other words, no snow - up to today when Lismore turned white! We had flurries, but nothing that stuck. My son in Dublin was stom
ping around like Tom Crean of the Antarctic, taking wonderful night photos of the frozen streets landscapes, while we watch the nightly news with shots of the country under a blanket of white. All we could muster here were some tasteful shots of the frozen floodplains I videotaped last month in the wake of the November rains. These never drained away so the water froze in recent weeks, and are now thick enough for skating, which the Irish have adopted with aplomb. We are still a long way from our Dutch speed-skating extended family, but we can dream of an Elfste
dentocht on the banks of the Blackwater.Meanwhile, we suffer on, waterless for the foreseeable future, until the thaw sets in. Then we will know what damage has been done. It is the pipe that carries the water from the mains that has frozen, we presume, as the neighbour has water. They are very good, giving us gallons of their H2O for the loo and the dishes, and people-washing, while other friends are offering us showers and laundry.
It's great to see the community spirit this harsh weather generates. It is like a throwback to the old days when a sense of community pervaded society at all levels and has been lost in the boom Celtic Tiger days. Now people are looking out for older neighbours, and vice v
ersa. Let's hope this "social capital", the term coined by Robert Putnam, persists long after the water has started flowing again.The photos show Lismore today, yesterday and last week - sunrise over Knockmealdown mountain, the frozen river floodplain in the sun, our house and back garden, Lismore name stone, our "cool dude"snowman, Lismore Castle avenue, castle from the Inches, Dungarvan Community Hospital in early morning frost, and the top pic of my blog header view taken today of the Courthouse and Monument in Lismore.
The YouTube videoclips were taken on 10th Jan 2010 in Lismore - in our garden with Ben the dog, and down at the Castle.
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