Not for the first time, all those red wind warnings had me imagining air conditions of that actual colour spreading across Ireland.
But then again, long before Met Éireann started talking about it, the concept of a Dulux-style wind-colour catalogue was well established here and elsewhere.
Disney fans among you may remember the native American princess Pocahontas, in the face of European settlers’ assumptions that she is an “ignorant savage”, lecturing them in song about stuff she knows and they don’t:
“Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon?/Or asked the grinning bobcat why he grinned?/Can you sing with all the voices of the mountain?/Can you paint with all the colors of the wind?”
Cardinal Red – Frank McNally on a cultural history of wind colour
Poison Pen – Frank McNally on the late-blooming Violet Needham, children’s novelist extraordinaire
From here to Timbuktu – Alison Healy on a byword for the most remote and distant place imaginable
Arsenic and Old Books – Frank McNally on a reader’s literary cry for help
The writer Padraic Colum (1881-1972) could certainly have painted with them, or at least he was familiar with the range.
In a 1953 poem, The Book of Kells, he imagined divine advice to the monks working on the manuscript, including this:
“The winds that blow about the world – the four/Winds in their colours on your pages join – /The Northern Wind – its blackness interpose; The Southern Wind – its blueness gather in:/In redness and in greenness manifest/The splendours of the Winds of East and West.”
That was at least partly in keeping with the Bible’s Book of Zechariah, in which the prophet has a vision of heavenly winds taking the form of chariots, led by black, white, red, and “grisled” horses:
Puzzled, he asks an angel what these are: “And the angel answered [. . .], These are the four spirits of the heavens, which go forth from standing before The Lord of all the earth.”
Zechariah then sees the black horses depart “into the north country”, thereby seeming to prophesy a Black North long before anyone in Ireland coined the term.
The concept of wind colour is explored at length in Flann O’Brien’s comic novel The Third Policeman, courtesy of old Philip Mathers – or rather of his soul, speaking shortly after his skull has been smashed in by the narrator’s spade.
“A record of this belief will be found in the literature of all ancient peoples,” declares the immortal part of Mathers, turning philosophical in eternity and detailing his own wind spectrum (which is somewhat at odds with Colum’s):
“There are four winds and eight sub-winds, each with its own colour. The wind from the east is a deep purple, from the south a fine, shining silver. The north wind is a hard black and the west is amber.”
Mathers recalls how, “in the old days”, people saw all of these and could spend a day “sitting quietly on a hillside watching the beauty of the winds, their fall and rise and changing hues, the magic of neighbouring winds when they are interweaved like ribbons at a wedding”.
Controversially for a man who was also an Irish Times columnist, O’Brien has his character add at this point: “It was a better occupation than gazing at newspapers”.
But then, undermining Met Éireann’s credibility too, Old Mathers waxes lyrical about one shade of wind in particular: “What could be more exquisite than a countryside swept lightly by cool rain reddened by the south-west breeze?”
On the other hand, he goes on to expand on a related theory: that prevailing wind colour at the time of birth dictates a person’s longevity. In which context, being born during a red wind warning might be bad luck.
This is because, in The Third Policeman’s surreal logic, each new-born baby is dressed in a gown of that colour and gets a new one in the same shade added every year.
They start out invisibly fine, especially if the colour is bright, but the layers darken with every birthday, until one day they become fatally opaque.
Old Mathers had been lucky (at least until his collision with a spade, of which he still appears unaware). He was born yellow. And in The Third Policeman, as in weather forecasts, yellow wind warnings are nothing to worry about:
“In my own case I had attained a bright full-blown yellow at fifteen although the colour was so light at birth as to be imperceptible. I am now nearing seventy and the colour is light brown. As my gowns come to me through the years ahead, [they] will deepen to dark brown, then a dull mahogany, and from that ultimately to that very dark sort of brownness one associates with stout.”
This week’s weather also reminded me of another former Irish Times columnist, Brendan McWilliams.
In times of storm, he used to write of the “Protestant winds” that once scattered the Spanish Armada off the Irish coast and, a century later, facilitated the “Glorious Revolution”.
Offered the English throne in 1688, Prince William of Orange and his ships were delayed for weeks in Holland by westerly gales.
Finally, in November of that year, conditions were right to blow them to England and a course that led eventually to the Battle of the Boyne.
The event was worthy, McWilliams quipped, of an Orange wind warning.
