It's coming

Next Thursday week, we will have equinox, when it is exactly twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of darkness. For me, this conjours the image of a spinning coin tipping on it's edge, getting ready to fall; a fall that will bring us into the long nights of winter. And like night follows day, like it or not, winter is coming.

As with all inevitable things in life, we have the option of trying to ignore and then begrudge them once their reality is forced upon us, or we can celebrate them. It's heartwarming to see that people are still celebrating the equinox at the passage tombs of Lough Crew, County Meath. For it is at the passage tombs of Lough Crew that the rising and the setting sun illuminates the inner chambers of the burial mounds, (one facing due east; one facing due west) five thousand years after our ancestors built them. I've never been there myself, but D Reilly assures me that it's worth an early start for.

This is an Irish Times photo presentation of the Spring Equinox, last March; and just listening to it gives me the tingles. Don't get me wrong; I'm far from thrilled at the prospect of another damp, cold, miserable Irish winter, but this is inevitable. It's coming: get over it. So this gives me two choices; I can either try my best at blithely ignoring it, and still end up waking up one day to find that's is dismally cold, utterly inclement and pitch dark at 8.30am; or I can wrap up, put on my coat and boots and climb an ancient hill at dawn to welcome the winter.

If all of this talk of winter darkness depresses you, I urge you to take to heart the simple, yet profound, words of Ok Go: "Let it go. This too shall pass". For on Wednesday, 23 March, we'll have another chance to traipse to Lough Crew; this time to welcome the summer.