Cavan Calling/Steph Booth: Like so many other women, I think the arrival of children permanently altered my sleep patterns. My oldest and youngest were both born in the middle of the night and I have had wakeful nights ever since.
I've always been in the early-to-bed, early-to-rise category, but a continuous night's sleep is now a real luxury.
On a dry night this wakefulness does now have its compensations. I go downstairs and make myself a mug of hot chocolate and, for extra comfort, add a generous slug of brandy. Putting a warm coat and scarf over my nightdress, I don my wellies and go outside. The reward is a night sky so awesome it makes my skin prickle. In the absolute silence I can believe I am alone on this planet. It is a strangely comforting feeling.
Perhaps it is the brandy, but sometimes if I stare hard enough at the stars I have the sensation of being pulled up towards them. It fulfils a childhood fantasy of being able to fly.
When it's wet I sometimes watch the dawn through my study window. The other morning the early light struggled to make an appearance. There was a smudge of red just touching the top of the mountain with a band of gloomy, grey sky above it, hemmed in and threatened by an enormous black raincloud. I watched the rain coming down. It looked like spectral shadows stalking the landscape. I can quite understand why there are so many local ghostly legends.
It is extraordinary how quickly the light and the weather change here. Recently we have experienced driving rain, hail, sunshine and rainbows within a matter of hours. The snow on the mountains on Christmas Day made everything look different again. While the sky was still heavy and grey, the fallen snow transformed everything into a benign winter scene. It was a wonderful surprise for our first Christmas in Ireland.
I am not sure, though, that those hardy individuals intending to make the charity swim in Lough Macnean were as delighted by the snow as we were. In fact, Kathleen Richie jokingly blamed me for the weather. She claimed it had not snowed in all the years the event had been taking place and that I had jinxed it by mentioning it in this column. I thought that was a little harsh, but the competitors certainly looked perished even before they got into the water.
The snow was driving in as more than 40 people flung themselves, with much squealing, into the lough. The weather meant spectators had to be pretty hardy as well. We huddled together for warmth, shouting encouragement with armfuls of towels and blankets at the ready. The tins of chocolates being passed around helped our spirits and kept us in full voice. It was all good fun and a good amount was raised for charity.
Talking of Lough Macnean, one of my neighbours pointed out that when I started this column I was spelling lough incorrectly as "loch". He told me that "loch" was the English spelling, but when I checked my Ordnance Survey Ireland map, there were two spellings, Lough Macnean and Loch Mac nEan. So now I'm really confused. The Irish-language publishing house, Cois Life, has kindly offered to send me a beginners' Irish-language book. I think the sooner I start the better. Trying to be correct and not offend by Anglicising I am just managing to get into a complete muddle.
Soon after Tony and I arrived in Ireland we discovered that a good way of reading a tiny amount of Irish and having some chance of understanding it was by looking at car registrations. We were told the letters were the first and last letters of the county with the Irish written at the top of the plate. A degree of domestic rivalry ensued as Tony and I competed to see who could figure out the most. "TN" and "TS" had us flummoxed for some time and "WH" drove us crazy for weeks.
What is interesting for non-speakers is that some of the Irish spellings of the counties are quite easy to figure out while others would be impossible without the clue provided by the registration plate. However, I really do hope in the next few months to be able to progress beyond reading Irish on car number plates!
